Synopsis:
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.
Edition:
Hardcover provided by the publisher (thank you, Sarah!)
Trigger Warnings:
Hover for Trigger WarningsMy Thoughts:
Deliver Me is such a bizarre, intense, wonderful story. Dee-Dee is kind of the epitome of an unlikable main character, and I am here for it. She’s awful. She’s shitty, trashy, she is in an extremely distressing long-term sexual relationship with a man who is arguably more off-putting than her. I don’t mean to kink shame, but…uh…Daddy (yes, she calls him Daddy exclusively), has Big Problems. He’s got a truly fucking weird kink, and I shame him for it.
You’re going to get a lot of off-putting content in Deliver Me. And it is truly a delight. I feel like this book has the vibes of Chuck Palahniuk, mixed with maybe some Samantha Kolesnik, and something that is wholly and uniquely Elle Nash. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s vaguely grindhousey, deeply upsetting, and something I believe you’d be hard-pressed to find outside a story written by Elle. I really can’t tell you how much I loved this awful, disturbing, beautiful, terrible story. Dee-Dee is a scourge on humanity, and she doesn’t even see it.
“We all live this way; things fall apart and their corpses rot in front of us as we adapt to a lesser way of living.”
I really don’t want to say much about Deliver Me, because something this deliciously heinous deserves to be experienced as blind as possible. But I will tell you this: Deliver Me is not for the faint of heart. To me, it felt like a slow-paced extreme horror – which is definitely not something you see all that often. Extreme horror tends to be pretty brisk, but this one moves at an almost meandering pace while still constantly poking at you with little bits of supreme ick. But it really is super good, I promise you that. Sometimes horror stories can feel so hard to review – like, ‘it was disgusting and terrible and I loved it so much!’ Yeah, that’s pretty much how I felt about Deliver Me. It passes my vibe check: creepy Evangelism, weird bug stuff, lots of dead things, Single White Female, Natural Born Killers, Lifetimesploitation.
Rating:
I deeply enjoyed this book, even though I had to briefly question my own sanity by the end of it. I definitely recommend checking it out – I know I’m going to go out and find anything else Nash has written so I can devour it post-haste.
Deliver Me By Elle Nash Unnamed Press Published: October 3, 2023 ISBN: 9781951213718 Hardcover, E-book 280 Pages
