“The factory is a fertile body, each breast a beginning. I make geometry of the meat and that keeps my mind in line – calming, comforting tenders and perfect fingers, my pneumatic scissors make sense of the mess.”

“Cults come and go … but the Pentecostal church is forever.”

Elle Nash’s Deliver Me (2024) is a powerful and timely work of body horror, a work that disturbs and provokes in equal measure. The novel demonstrates the importance of horror as a literary mode, as Nash deploys gut-churning sequences to explore ideas around poverty, embodiment and religion, particularly as they pertain to women living in the southern states of the USA. Nash has created a unique literary hybrid, a gungy horror story involving abattoirs, insect fetishes, and a terrifyingly psychotic protagonist that unflinchingly explores the ways in which religion, poverty and pregnancy are used to control women’s lives in the Deep South, with thematic and philosophical echoes of Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. (1964). It succeeds both as a wonderfully grotesque thrill ride and a thoughtful dissection of the social ills plaguing the US’ working class. And it’s a first rate exploration of a damaged psyche, a view of the world through a compellingly disturbed unreliable narrator. 

Dee-Dee lives in small town Missouri with her unemployed ex-con boyfriend Daddy, and works in a meatpacking facility converting live chickens into processed meat. Although she fled the Pentecostal church she was brought up in, she can’t escape her devout mother, who pours her judgement and scorn on Dee-Dee down the phone. Dee-Dee dreams of becoming a mother, to fulfil the role set out by the church, her family and her society and to incubate new life. After suffering a series of miscarriages, Dee-Dee finds herself pregnant again and hoping to finally get what she wants, and not even the baby miscarrying will stop her. Her attempts to believe her way into her perfect life hit a snag when Sloane, her childhood friend and crush, returns after twenty years. Sloane brings with her Dee-Dee’s repressed adolescent feelings of lust and jealousy, and her own pregnancy pushes Dee-Dee out of her carefully controlled fantasy into a whirlwind of vengeance and violence. 

From its opening lines, quoted above, Deliver Me makes explicit the connection between Dee-Dee’s brutal and dehumanizing work at the meat processing plant and Dee-Dee’s own body’s transformation into a baby factory. Dee-Dee has spent all her life in a very conservative environment, and as both working class and a woman she is very much a second-class citizen, except when she is fulfilling her societally-mandated role of carrying a baby to term. The pregnant woman in the religious and conservative Southern states occupies this strange liminal role whereby they are accorded greater respect for, as Nash herself puts it in an introductory note, “performing some service to traditional family values,” whilst at the same time having fewer rights in many ways than their own foetus, as we see in the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the stripping back of reproductive rights across the States. Dee-Dee is constantly reminded of her status as a working class woman, from her mother who wants her to return to the church and get married so she is no longer living in sin, then she can fulfil her biological destiny of having babies, to her partner Daddy – the uncomfortable oedipal connotations of Dee-Dee’s nickname for him are intentional – who despite being more interested in smuggling insects than holding down a steady job, has deeply traditional patriarchal views about who should be earning the money in the household and how his girlfriend should be spending her time. Dee-Dee fetishizes pregnancy as a kind of escape from the societal pressures she feels all around her, as a way of, however obliquely and perversely, reclaiming some kind of agency for herself and her body, even as it reduces it to a purely reproductive role. Her descent into mania begins as her refusal to acknowledge that the miscarriage has taken this away from her.

Exacerbating all this is Dee-Dee’s dissatisfaction with her sexual life with Daddy, who is turned on by a bizarre mixture of insect fetish and sadism, and her repressed lesbian sexual desire for her childhood friend Sloane. In order to maintain her precarious lifestyle, Dee-Dee feels safer submitting to Daddy’s sexual whims which clearly make her uncomfortable rather than feeling free to explore her sexuality with Sloane. This delicate and deeply dysfunctional balance is upset by the reappearance of Sloane in her life. Much of the horror of the early part of the novel comes from the sheer grimness of Dee-Dee’s situation, from her horrible job, her shitty boyfriend, and her childhood crush who has the agency, the pregnancy, and the love from Dee-Dee’s mother that Dee-Dee has never been able to achieve. Nash does an excellent job in creatin Dee-Dee’s voice, and completely sucks the reader into her worldview, so that by the time the reader begins to notice the depths of her derangement it is much too late. Deliver Me is twistier than the darkest of psychological thrillers, and the revelation of the depths of its violence blindsided me. By the end, the reader understands that however much we may sympathise with Dee-Dee and feel for her horrible situation, she is a person who has divorced herself from reality and has  gone off the deep end. Disturbing, visceral and thought-provoking, Deliver Me is horror both chilling and politically engaged, a powerful and timely novel. I look forward to reading what Nash does next. 

Deliver Me is available now, you can order your copy on Bookshop.org