Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"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
Review
"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
Review
"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
Review
"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
Synopsis
"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
"...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
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.
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.