Description
At a meatpacking facility in Missouri, Dee-Dee and her coworkers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift.
The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee's more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term.
Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges her to quit living in sin and marry her boyfriend, Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect fetish. With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother and boyfriend's newfound attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She will be complete.
When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go back to living in the shadows. Neither another miscarriage nor Sloane's own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby's arrival.
About the Author
Elle Nash is the author of the novel Animals Eat Each Other (Dzanc Books), which was featured in O Magazine and hailed by Publishers Weekly as a "complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire." Upon publication of her novel in the UK, she appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to present the work of under-represented voices with Amnesty International, and to speak about sex, death and feminism in literature. Her work appears in Guernica, Adroit, The Creative Independent, Hazlitt, Literary Hub, Cosmopolitan, New York Tyrant and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine. She currently lives in Glasgow, Scotland and will be touring major US cities in October 2023.
Reviews
To read the work of Elle Nash is to be restored to faith in the wildness, wetness, and visceral power of contemporary American fiction. Deliver Me is a barbed liturgy of bugs, babies, meat, the gospel, women lusting women, women lusting men, and the human body. Get saved -- Melissa Broder, author of Milk Fed and Death Valley
A horror with heart... The various strands of Deliver Me are nicely woven together, bringing out themes of motherhood, yearning, jealousy, the meat industry and American-made religion. There is an emotional depth to Nash's novel that does not take away from, but rather adds to, the horror that lies at its centre * Dazed *
Deliver Me is pure jaw-dropping horror while also serving up a piercing insight into the control of women's bodies and the expectations placed upon them. Mixing single-minded maternal desire with religion in the deep south, Nash's ending is one you will never forget * Stylist *
Nash takes no prisoners in this visceral slice of body horror that mixes up pregnancy, poverty and Pentecostalism. It's a hot mess of a novel coolly rendered. Which just makes the horror of it cut even deeper * Herald (Top 10 Summer Reads) *
Deliver Me by Elle Nash takes chances with thrilling results... demonstrating an ever-improving sense of craft... There is a slowly creeping dread that builds as the narrative twists and turns to a satisfying and shocking climax. Throughout, Nash feels like a writer completely in control of her story * Big Issue *
Book Information
ISBN 9780857308610
Author Elle Nash
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Verve Books
Publisher Verve Books