Deliver Me
Longlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year 2024
Published on 27. June 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
288 pages
978-0-85730-861-0 (ISBN)
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
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 * A creepy and unsettling body of horror. The story, focusing on Dee-Dee, a worker in a meatpacking plant, is ominous, tragic and unlike anything else I've ever read. Three of my friends and I all read this on a trip to France last year; none of us could put it down. Ideal for fans of Margaret Atwood, Otessa Moshfegh and Emma Cline * Newsweek * 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) *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 196 mm
Width: 128 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
206 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-85730-861-0 (9780857308610)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
10/2023
1st Edition
Verve Books
from
€8.49
Available for download
Person
ELLE NASH ;(she/her) is a British-American author and editor known for her fearless exploration of desire, identity and the human condition. Her most recent novel, ;Deliver Me, is a 'darkly vivid examination of faith, obsession and alienation' and was longlisted for Fiction Book of the Year by the Saltire Society. She is also the author of debut novel ;Animals Eat Each Other ;(2018), the short story collection ;Nudes ;(2021) and the novella ;Gag Reflex ;(2022). Her work has appeared in ;Guernica, ;BOMB, ;Literary Hub, ;Cosmopolitan, ;Mslexia, ;The Spectator, ;Columbia Journal, ;Southwest Review, ;New York Tyrant ;and more. She is currently based in Glasgow.