Review of Katherine Dunn's 'Toad'

“Flowering” is too pretty a term for the phenomenon. What to call the current efflorescence of female grossness in fiction? Perhaps what we’re looking at is a kind of collective dirty protest: in many notable new women-authored novels, rage and disgust come locked in sustaining union—to be enraged is to be disgusted, is to wish to disgust, and so on. As the walls of decency are daubed with various fuck-yous of bodily fluids, a whiff of feminism arises.