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.
Review:
Often the stories I find most frightening are the ones that explore everyday life, the repetition and mundanity of a life that there seems to be no escape. It is difficult to imagine a job that embodies a so wearisome and dispassionate existence more than a role that measures success by the number of chickens killed on a daily basis. ‘Deliver Me’ quickly places us in these lonely, clinical surroundings. This is a place where coworkers are referred to by number rather than name (our main character Dee-Dee is number 4), nobody can leave until the daily quota of 40,000+ chickens have been slaughtered, and workers’ rights are a pipe dream. Hour upon hour of robotic massacre, slicing chicken breast after identical chicken breast. If this sounds like a depressing and completely dehumanising experience then you would be correct, but the slaughterhouse in which our main character works at barely even scratches the surface of the mundane horrors that slither and crawl throughout Elle Nash’s ‘Deliver Me’.
Nash’s latest novel offers a volatile concoction of dread and pity. The inevitable feeling that something bad is going to happen aches and lingers as Dee-Dee’s mental wellbeing deteriorates, but more than anything this story leaves you with a sorrowful emptiness characterised by gut-wrenching sympathy. Dee-Dee’s job is the tip of the iceberg in her sorry life. Dee-Dee is a woman with little self-esteem and with no core identity. She craves validation and acceptance from the people around her, particularly her judgmental Christian mother and her emotionally manipulative, criminal boyfriend. A baby seems like the magic cure, the way to keep her partner for good, and to finally win the approval of her mother. After another miscarriage, matters take a turn for the worse.
‘Deliver Me’ is a startlingly real look into how life can close in and suffocate you if you are not careful. Dee-Dee lives life through a mirror, constantly comparing herself to those around her and reducing herself to something below and lesser than her counterparts. This is no more apparent than through her relationship with childhood best friend and crush Sloane, who in having a baby and her mother’s love and acceptance, possesses everything that Dee-Dee wishes she had. Motherhood quickly becomes a fixation and an imagined salvation from the life she is trapped within, but the tragedy that the reader realises, and Dee-Dee doesn’t, is that nobody can save Dee-Dee except for Dee-Dee. In this way ‘Deliver Me’ is a lesson in suffering. We wish for Dee-Dee to break free from her life and yet she seems to only slip further into the abyss.
‘Maybe that’s why I need a child. Someone who is too much like me to reject me’
‘Deliver Me’ is a story that lavishes in its transgressions. Nash is unflinching in her writing, emboldened to cross boundaries that even the most seasoned of horror writers often veer away from. This of course does not come without trigger warnings. Sections involving pregnancy and miscarriage are known and to be expected, but what comes more as a shock are the instances of animal cruelty within the story that truly are difficult to get through. Simply put, ‘Deliver Me’ is mean and ruthless to both character and reader. Elle Nash rolls together themes of co-dependency, obsession, social conformity and religious trauma into a tight and compact little ball, and then delights in the murky chaos as it explodes in our faces.
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