Recent Reading: Mostly Dead Things

I recently read an unusual book I got from my local public library: Kristen Arnett 's Mostly Dead Things. The books is certainly not your average bear book. Here is the publisher summary:

One morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into the family taxidermy shop to find that her father has committed suicide, right there on one of the metal tables. Shocked and grieving, Jessa steps up to manage the failing business, while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the shop to make aggressively lewd art with the taxidermied animals. Her brother Milo withdraws, struggling to function. And Brynn, Milo’s wife—and the only person Jessa’s ever been in love with—walks out without a word. As Jessa seeks out less-than-legal ways of generating income, her mother’s art escalates—picture a figure of her dead husband and a stuffed buffalo in an uncomfortably sexual pose—and the Mortons reach a tipping point.

In other words, the key words in this book are: doomed lesbian love, parental suicide, taxidermy, erotic art, weird Florida.

The book and Kristen Arnett have admirers. LitHub called Mostly Dead Things one of their most anticipated books of 2019:

If reading Kristen Arnett’s very funny, unexpectedly poignant Lit Hub columns weren’t enough to convince me to read her debut novel, it’s set in a family-run taxidermy shop. Arnett has written, beautifully, about her fraught feelings for her home state of Florida, where this novel is set. Noted Floridian Karen Russell called it “A love letter to Florida and to family, to half-lit swamps and the 7/11,” and I can’t think of any writer more equipped to tackle the humor and devastation of such places and things.

Arnett has a new book out published this month that I haven't read yet, With Teeth. Awesome cover, don't you think?

Back to Mostly Dead Things. Perhaps it is not obvious that the weirdness can also be funny. There were several humorous moments when I read. In addition, the book has an awesome cover. Allow me to quote one passage that I liked from the book:

I couldn't process the way my mother used sex in her art. It was as if my father's death had set something loose in her, bottled up for the entirety of their marriage. When my brother and I were growing up, my mother talked to us about sex. Never mentioned a single thing that would lead me to believe she'd be capable of creating sex-toy art. She'd sometimes joked around with Milo, teasing him about girls, but it was always lighthearted. Never anything graphic or profane. She hadn't even liked touching most of the taxidermied stuff. Had never once asked my father if she could help out in the store, as far as I knew.

Let me tell you about it, she had said as she pulled S&M gear from boxes. There's a lot you should know.

I didn't want to know any of it. I wished I knew less.

My mother plugged ball gags into mouths broken open with pliers, wrenched out teeth and sliced off papery tongues. She stuck these inside a clear plastic pouch that hung from the back end of a beaver, the anus an open wound surrounded with more sequins, these ones red. There were handcuffs lined with orange-red fox fur. She used a nail gun to adhere nipple clamps to a female elk whose legs she'd sewn off at the knees.

It felt like watching a low-budget slasher film. I wanted to fast-forward to the end, to get to the part where we could pretend none of it had happened. This wouldn't be one of those things we'd be able to talk about fondly, a funny memory we discussed over coffee. It was going to be something that wrecked us all and made it so we couldn't ever look at each other again. The previous week, when I refused to go into the back to look at the pieces, my mother brought up my father again (pgs 128-129).

I think it is safe to say that Arnett's book is not for everyone. However, I am glad I read it.