Deliver Me
Elle Nash
(Author)
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Description
This is the horror of living within a body.
"To read the work of Elle Nash is to be restored to faith in the wildness, wetness, and visceral power of contemporary American fiction." --MELISSA BRODER, author of Milk Fed, The Pisces, and Death Valley
At a meatpacking facility in the Missouri Ozarks, Dee-Dee and her co-workers 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 Dee-Dee 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's and boyfriend's newfound parturient 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 the ultimate indignity of yet another miscarriage nor Sloane's own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby's arrival.
Product Details
| Publisher | Unnamed Press |
| Publish Date | October 03, 2023 |
| Pages | 280 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781951213718 |
| Dimensions | 8.5 X 5.5 X 1.2 inches | 0.9 pounds |
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 and currently lives in Glasgow, Scotland.
Reviews
One of GQ's Best Books of 2024
Longlisted for the 2024 Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year
"A new wave of horror, something beyond extreme, beyond transgressive..." --Cynthia Pelayo, The Lineup
"...an explosive ending that will stun readers... Readers drawn to gritty character studies should take a look." --PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Haunting and at times relentlessly cruel, this novel will keep readers guessing." --KIRKUS 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, The Pisces, and Death Valley
"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
"As sickeningly meticulous as a post-mortem performed by the most skilled mortician, Deliver Me is a dangerous, delicate marvel." --Maryse Meijer, author of The Seventh Mansion
"Immaculately conceived." --William Walsh
"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)
"Audacious, disturbing, and utterly unique, Elle Nash's Deliver Me is body horror at its most shocking and unforgettable." --Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
"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 a gift to readers who love a seriously unhinged woman. With the creation of Dee-Dee, Elle Nash spelunks in the depths of human depravity and leaves readers (even me!) gasping. A wild, disturbing, super-smart novel, Deliver Me is unforgettable." --Chelsea G. Summers, Bestselling author of A Certain Hunger
"Very carefully crafted and terrifyingly grounded in the broken mind of its narrator, Deliver Me is a haunting slow-burn to genuine shock and awe." --Fangoria
"Elle Nash is one of the best writers alive. This book is utterly fearless, utterly devastating, and an uncompromising masterpiece. Reading Deliver Me made me feel like I was possessed." --Juliet Escoria, author of Juliet the Maniac and I Am the Snake
"Elle Nash dances a knife's edge in Deliver Me, a world where a person's hands can save or steal, conceal or reveal, lure you in or lie, and sometimes all of these at once. Her characters act so appalling, yet still I prayed for their salvation. She's that good at guiding you all the way into them." --Sarah Gerard, author of True Love
"Combining body horror, toxic relationships, and a swell of past trauma, Deliver Me is a whirlwind of emotions perfect for any horror lover." --OURCULTURE Magazine
"A visceral, painful, obsessive, and yet still somehow humane portrait of a woman caught between her religious past and her chicken-slaughtering ex-con-loving present, whose delusions are on a collision course with reality. Deliver Me muddles the line between the intimate and the deranged in a way that keeps us off-balance to the very end." --Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses
"Deliver Me should come with a barf bag tucked inside the jacket. Things get too real when Nash connects the dots between growing up with a narcissistic mother and how the resulting, ever-crumbling personal boundaries push a teenage queer crush off a cliff into obsession." --Autostraddle
"No one can swirl sex and strange quite like Elle Nash, and Deliver Me rubs creation against devastation on a wild ride of self discovery away from a Christian-shaped cult. It's a religious and troubling experience-- a work of art from an artist to watch." --Brian Alan Carr, author of Opioid, Indiana
"Nash's Ozarks conjure the colorful and desperate scenes of Dorothy Allison and JT LeRoy. Her descriptions of industrial killing call to mind Eric Schlosser and Upton Sinclair. The complex relationship between the main female characters echo Jeffery Eugenides and Amy Hempel. The oppressive religiosity of the Southern church summons Flannery O'Connor and Dennis Covington. The sum of this concoction is a hallucinatory, pressure cooker of a novel that spills from Nash's soul onto your own." --Electric Literature
"In Deliver Me, Nash has produced a singular, devastating, uncompromising masterpiece. Very rarely do you come across a novel so committed to apprehending the reader, making them accountable, forcing them to bear full witness to the horrors of a community in collapse. Here, the rollback of reproductive rights and mental health support is dangerously coupled with a return to right-wing conceptions of motherhood and gendered social duties." --James Taylor, Glasgow Review of Books
"With her trademark psychological complexity and unflinching centering of the human body in all its grotesqueness, Deliver Me is Elle Nash at the height of her powers. Riveting from beginning to end." --Wendy Jean Fox, Electric Literature
"In the end, this novel should go a long way to silencing those critics, like Knausgaard, who claim that thrill rides have no merit... Strange but beguiling this one is." --Zachary Houle, Medium
"[Daisy] is, quite simply, one of the most well-realized, and most important characters I've come across in years." --Dave Fitzgerald for The Heavy Feather Review
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