Drawing on new research in Katherine Dunn’s archive, this chapter sets Dunn’s career, and Geek Love especially, in a new literary history which recognises her role in the transition from a postmodern treatment of the subject as culturally constructed to a meatfictional treatment of the subject as an evolved, animal, culturally troubled body. Reading Dunn’s work against both the postmodern metafictionists and the broader American romantic tradition, I argue firstly that Dunn’s treatment of women, in particular, is wrapped up with her understanding of mammalian life, and secondly that her (neglected) treatment of vegetarianism and meat-eating—emblematised by Chick and his relationship with cats, horses, and other animals—owes a direct debt to Hawthorne and Melville, in whose universes love and horror are intimately bound together. Finally, by suggesting that Dunn’s metafiction anticipates future meatfictions by Ben Lerner, Amelia Gray, and others who come to treat authorship as a mammalian affair, I lay the foundation for a critical appreciation of the evolving nature of metafiction around the turn of the millennium.