Deliver Me
Elle Nash
Verve, £9.99
Elle Nash may now be living in Glasgow, but her third novel, Deliver Me, is rooted in the American South in which she grew up. Set in Missouri, it’s a slice of Southern Gothic body horror which is disturbing, uncompromising and almost certainly one of the most visceral books of the year.
Nash has written that with this novel she wanted to explore the status of pregnant women in the Southern Pentacostal culture, where access to contraception and abortion are limited and women valued for the extent to which they embody traditional family values. In her experience, being pregnant in the American South “gives you first-class citizen status”, which rapidly falls away after giving birth, along with support from social services. The repeal of Roe v. Wade while the novel was being written has no doubt given it even greater bite.
Dee-Dee, 34 years old, works at a chicken processing plant, filleting thousands of the creatures every day with a pair of air-powered shears. Nash spares us nothing of the gritty physicality of the work, and the skin continues to crawl when Dee-Dee goes home to the boyfriend she creepily calls Daddy, a breeder and smuggler of rare insects, which he has a fetish for incorporating into his and Dee-Dee’s sex life.
Dee-Dee may have left the church behind, but she’s thoroughly internalised the role of the submissive wife, deferring to Daddy in all things and grateful for his “intellect” and the structure he’s brought to her life. Her whole identity is bound up in the idea of being pregnant, and after five miscarriages she’s convinced that she’s expecting for real this time.
Despite doctors’ insistence that she’s not pregnant, Dee-Dee plays the part to the full, wearing maternity clothes, signing up for pre-natal classes and grossly overeating to distend her belly. In her more self-aware moments, she reasons that even if she’s not actually carrying a child at least she’s creating the conditions that would somehow encourage the baby she so badly wants to come and inhabit her.
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With Dee-Dee’s mental state already fragile, the reappearance in her life of a former close friend, Sloane, threatens to tip her over the edge. Twenty years earlier, she had had a huge crush on Sloane, admiring her irreverence when she mischievously pretended to fall into a trance at revivalist meetings, and was kept dangling on a hook by the prospect of their friendship blossoming into something sexual.
In flashbacks, we see how their bond developed in the shadow of the church and Dee-Dee’s cold, disciplinarian mother, who showered Sloane with all the affection she denied her own daughter. Sloane’s memory has tormented Dee-Dee for years, and now that she is back – pregnant, needless to say – a storm of complex, competitive, tangled emotions is whipped up which is not going to be easily dispelled.
For all that she’s a deluded and potentially dangerous individual, Dee-Dee is an expressive narrator who’s often very insightful about her own predicament, and it’s hard not to feel some degree of sympathy for her.
Even if Nash pushes the grossness to levels that start to feel gratuitous, it’s still all in the service of a slow-burning psychological thriller that interrogates not only Dee-Dee’s psyche but the religion that continues to exert a powerful, mystical hold on her, and threatens ultimately to draw her back in. Deliver Me is a bold book, and not for the squeamish, but those who can make it to the end will find that it’s wormed its way into their brains, and once there is hard to dislodge.
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