** Longlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year 2024 **
From the author of Nudes and Animals Eat Each Other comes an unsettling story of motherhood, manipulation and murder.
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.
PRAISE FOR DELIVER ME
'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
'A horror with heart' - DAZED
'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 Death Valley & Death Valley
'Depraved and brilliant and I love it so much!' - JANE FLETT, author of Freakslaw
'Audacious, disturbing, and utterly unique, Elle Nash's Deliver Me is body horror at its most shocking and unforgettable' - ERIC LaROCCA, author of Everything the Darkness Eats
'Brilliant, fearless, and utterly deranged, Deliver Me is a gift to readers who love a seriously unhinged woman... A wild, disturbing, super-smart novel, Deliver Me is unforgettable' - CHELSEA G SUMMERS, author of A Certain Hunger
'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' - SARAH GERARD, author of True Love
'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
'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... Nash's ending is one you will never forget' - STYLIST
'In Deliver Me, Nash has produced a singular, devastating, uncompromising masterpiece' - GLASGOW REVIEW OF BOOKS
'A gruesome body horror... I read it in two days flat... The squeamish need not apply - the braver of you should tuck in' - SPECTATOR
This novel contains discussion of miscarriage and depictions of animal cruelty and body horror.