Deliver Me

** 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.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR DELIVER ME

‘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

‘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

‘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

‘Nash excels at capturing the claustrophobia of rural poverty and religious fundamentalism… Haunting’ - KIRKUS