Deliver me : a novel

At a meatpacking facility in the Missouri Ozarks, Dee-Dee & her co-workers kill & butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift. The work is repetitive & brutal, with each stab & cut a punishment to her hands & 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, & 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 & 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 & 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.°°° Elle Nash is the author of the novel Animals Eat Each Other (Dzanc Books), which was featured in O Magazine & hailed by Publishers Weekly as a “complex, impressive exploration of obsession & desire.” Upon publication of her novel in the UK, she appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to present the work of under-represented voices with Amnesty International, & to speak about sex, death & feminism in literature. Her work appears in Guernica, Adroit, The Creative Independent, Hazlitt, Literary Hub, Cosmopolitan, New York Tyrant & elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine. She currently lives in Glasgow, Scotland and will be touring major US cities in October 2023. A middle-class ex-Manhattanite, a cash-strapped single mother, and a young member of an obscure religious "sect," become entangled in a Catskills town. Claire Pedersen and her husband are relocating from NYC to the Catskills—they have found a terrific deal on a property in foreclosure. The house has been in April Ives' family for three generations, but the single mother of three children from two different fathers needs the money. Claire and April are instantly antagonistic, but the sale proceeds, and renovations begin. Soon after, Claire's husband develops an erotic fascination with Anna, a young member of a nearby religious community called The Eternals. Two marriages—and one pregnancy—swiftly and dramatically end. Claire is left to finish the renovation and salvage the life she had imagined. April, meanwhile, is dealing with her ex who has just been released from prison on a drug charge and the decision of whether or not to let him build a relationship with the son he has never known. Life "upcountry" means close encounters between disparate social classes: Claire and April navigate mutual dislike and unanticipated empathy. The house remains a sore point for both. Anna is the unhappy fulcrum between the two older women. Shunned from The Eternals since the incident with Claire's husband, she yearns to return to their protection. Anna's strict views on transgression and penance are baffling to April; for Claire, Anna remains the embodiment of her ruined marriage. "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 teenage crush 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"-- Provided by publisher 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.