Deliver Me

Elle Nash

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.

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: a Novel

"Audacious, disturbing, and utterly unique, Elle Nash’s Deliver Me is body horror at its most shocking and unforgettable."

—Eric LaRocca, Bram Stoker Award Winner and 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 and I Am The Snake

"To read the work of Elle Nash is to be restored to faith in the wildness, wetness, and visceral power of contemporary American fiction. Get saved."

—Melissa Broder, author of Milk Fed, The Pisces, and Death Valley

"Deliver Me is a gift to readers who love a seriously unhinged woman. With the creation of Dee-Dee, Elle Nash spelunks in the depths of human depravity and leaves readers (even me!) gasping. A wild, disturbing, super-smart novel, Deliver Me is unforgettable."

—Chelsea G. Summers, Bestselling author of A Certain Hunger

"Haunting and at times relentlessly cruel, this novel will keep readers guessing."

—Kirkus Reviews

"...an explosive ending that will stun readers… Readers drawn to gritty character studies should take a look."

—Publishers Weekly

"In the end, this novel should go a long way to silencing those critics, like Knausgaard, who claim that thrill rides have no merit… Strange but beguiling this one is."

—Zachary Houle, Medium

"[Daisy] is, quite simply, one of the most well-realized, and most important characters I’ve come across in years."

—Dave Fitzgerald, The Heavy Feather Review

"With her trademark psychological complexity and unflinching centering of the human body in all its grotesqueness, Deliver Me is Elle Nash at the height of her powers. Riveting from beginning to end."

—Wendy Jean Fox, Electric Literature

"As sickeningly meticulous as a post-mortem performed by the most skilled mortician, Deliver Me is a dangerous, delicate marvel."

—Meryse Meijer, author of The Seventh Mansion

"Deliver Me muddles the line between the intimate and the deranged in a way that keeps us off-balance to the very end."

—Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses

"Deliver Me is an immaculately conceived novel. Nash has brought to life a narrator whose quest to be a mother is frightening and absolutely brutal."

—William Walsh