‘Deliver Me’ Author Elle Nash On Violence And Strange Intimacy
Elle Nash’s new novel Deliver Me is a visceral examination of one woman’s spiral into madness after years of abuse and manipulation by her mother, the Church, and pretty much everyone else around her. Nash creates a disgusting yet beautiful world that presents a new kind of interrogation of what it means to be a mother and the importance such a role can have to those who are able to bear children.
Read the full synopsis:
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.
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.
Dread Central spoke with Nash about violent women, linking bugs with intimacy, and much more.
Dread Central: So Deliver Me, this is your fourth book.
Elle Nash: Yes! Technically it’s my second novel because Gag Reflex is kind of like a novella. It’s like an experimental thing. And then, Nudes is a short story collection. So I feel like this is my second novel, and in a way, I almost feel like it’s my first real big baby. I don’t know why. I think because when you first start out writing, you don’t know what you’re doing. But when I started Deliver Me, I think I was a little more intentional about being like, “No, this is going to be a book”.
DC: Can you just tell us a little bit about what Deliver Me is about?
EN: So Deliver Me follows the story of a woman who works at a chicken factory in the Ozarks, and she’s stuck in this world between her religious fundamentalist past, but also still really wants to be a mother so badly. She’s had many miscarriages. It doesn’t seem like it’s something that’s going to pull through for her. The novel opens with her believing that she’s pregnant and that this is going to be the one that sticks. In this process, her childhood best friend, who also was kind of her first teenage crush, ends up moving back to this small town and bringing up all these painful memories for her.
She oscillates between feeling worried that her best friend’s going to steal away her boyfriend, and then also grappling with all these past feelings that she had and trying to maintain all this together towards the end of the novel. That’s the main thrust.
DC: Deliver Me is just so gross and beautiful, and that’s my favorite kind of book. How did you come to this idea? Did a character come to you first? A location? There’s so much specificity happening here that I love.
EN: When I came across this idea in 2015, this really fringe crime happened in the town that I was living in. I was reading the headlines and following the story, and a part of it involved this woman who had faked her pregnancy for nine months. I was fascinated by the idea that a person could create this kind of lie that they lived in for so long, but that no one around her would notice. It intrigued me and it pulled on these questions of, well, what is our community? What are the people around her? Where did society fail this person?
Because it was definitely a crime that was a result of mental illness. And it just stayed with me for a long time. This was before I even became a mom. I think that idea just stayed with me. But I didn’t start writing this book until 2018. So it was like three years that I just was mulling over what this was. So that’s how it started.
But also during that time, I moved to the Ozarks to a small town in Arkansas. I’d grown up in the South as a child, so it wasn’t super foreign to me. When I lived in Arkansas, I lived off the grid for a while in the woods with some friends. Something about how beautiful the Ozarks are, I really wanted to capture those experiences and feelings, too. I just feel like northwest Arkansas is this little gem inside most of Arkansas. The forests and the people and all that were really, I don’t know, really good. It’s a convergence of a lot of different cultures and people all at once.
DC: That’s amazing. Dee-Dee is such a fascinating character. She is both doing the worst, but also doing what she thinks is her best. What was it like occupying Dee-Dee’s headspace while writing this novel?
EN: So the very first draft that I wrote [of Deliver Me] was in the third person. But I’m not super good at third-person writing. I’ve always written in first person. It’s kind of how I was taught, but I did want to attempt [third person]. When I completed that first draft, I didn’t feel close enough to this character. There was this psychic distance that I wasn’t satisfied with. So I started an edit and just switched it all over to the first person. So it was hard and it wasn’t hard. Some of it was a combination of doing a lot of research, reading a lot of really old true crime kind of pulpy novels about these certain kinds of criminal cases and just trying to understand where these psychologies come from.
Then another part of it was, I think one thing that I’m always exploring in my work, a theme that I’m constantly coming back to is desire or just where the origin of suffering comes from, this place of the gap between what you want and what you have and how that combined with feelings of alienation and society affects people. I’m always fascinated by that. And so in some ways, it wasn’t hard for me with the psychology because I’ve felt alienated in society and I yearn, I suffer. We all have those feelings, and in those ways, it’s easy for me to bring up those kinds of emotions and feelings in a work. I am deeply interested in that specific space and I don’t know why. I think I’m constantly mulling that over in my life in general. So that part I enjoyed a lot.
I enjoyed being in the character of the book and thinking about just what her experience might be like. It was hard thinking about how I was going to bring people on this quest with her. You have to take steps with her. Even just in general for me and my personal experience with mental illness, it’s like sometimes you can just be taking the steps and not realize how suddenly mired you are in something.
DC: Well, and I love that about your prose because it feels so normal, but then you’re like, “Wait, hold on, there are some red flags”, especially when she’s talking to her mom on the phone. You really realize how toxic that relationship is, and I love how instead of trying to draw a ton of attention to it, you make these things every day. That lends to the everyday horror of the book in a really interesting way.
EN: Thank you. That’s one thing that I really love about horror as a genre is that there’s almost no end to the horizon of human experience possible. It’s so deep, truly, almost anything that we can conjure can happen. And that’s on the spectrum of beautiful ecstasy, but also the most horrendous and terrifying things that we can possibly imagine. In some ways, it’s an everyday experience, too. Maybe not for everyone all the time, but yeah.
DC: You bring religion into this since Dee-Dee’s ex-Pentecostal. So did you grow up religious or did you just do a lot of research? How did that part aspect of Dee-Dee’s character come into the story?
EN: So I grew up going to Sunday school. When my dad retired from the military, we moved to Colorado Springs, which is the home of Focus On The Family, and there are 600 churches in that town. Luckily for me, I think I was about 13 when I was like, “I’m done with God”. So I started exploring witchcraft and stuff.
DC: I feel like most of us had that phase, especially us femmes who were raised Catholic or some version of Christianity.
EN: Definitely, because it’s the first time you’re really thinking about and understanding power in your world and maybe how you can access that. Luckily though, my parents never forced me into anything after that. But my dad is definitely kind of Jesus-obsessed. He would watch all the Left Behind movies. He was obsessed with post-apocalyptic movies, especially if they had to do with God. Every Christmas he would do movie marathons of The Greatest Story Ever Told and Jesus Christ Superstar.
But a lot of my research and the work that I did for Deliver Me in particular, [the religious aspect] did come later. My partner grew up in a fundamentalist household, too. So we have often talked for long hours about Christianity in general. Its structure in society, how when people leave it, how these mental structures can sometimes stay in your mind and you don’t even realize it.
I also did go to a United Pentecostal Church a couple of times in Arkansas. I needed that firsthand experience to understand it, but also lots of reading the Bible, lots of watching and listening to sermons, and reading many different translations of certain verses of the Bible just to understand the differences. What’s interesting to me, there are so many different sects of Christianity, and they argue on what’s the best translation and what’s the purest way to worship and all of these things. That exists in any organized religion. But those differences have always kind of fascinated me because in some ways, they shape history, they shape how we understand our societies.
DC: Have you seen the French movie Inside?
EN: No. So when I was first setting out on Deliver Me, I was like, “What’s all the media that I can find about this topic?” I could only find two or three books, and they were nonfiction. And then someone told me about this movie Inside, and I was like, I don’t want to watch it because I’m still working on this. But now, five years later, maybe now is the time for me to explore.
DC: You should watch it because they’re very different but some of the violence is similar. That movie deals with motherhood and femininity and grapples with those concepts in an extremely violent way. I love Scary Ladies.
EN: This past week, I watched both Incantation and Men, and they both kind of deal with motherhood in interesting ways, too. I don’t know why but it’s a very fascinating place to explore.
DC: In Deliver Me, there is a fetish that involves insects that is so interesting, and you handle it in a way that is, I mean, it’s gross, but again, there’s a beauty in that intimacy. Where did that come from, the bugs crawling on people while having sex?
EN: It’s always hard to answer this question because I think I just have spent so much time on the asshole of the internet just looking at things that live in my head rent-free. It was actually later in the drafting process that it came to me to include this in the novel. I sent a draft to my agent and he was like, “Let’s turn this up to 11.”And I was just like, “OK, alright, here we go.”
For me, on a personal level, I used to be a person with an extreme phobia of spiders. I remember one time, I think I was 17, and I picked up a box of tea from my mom’s pantry and a spider crawled out of the box. I threw it and screamed and cried. That’s how bad my phobia was. But a couple of years later, I met the writer Juliet Escoria, and I can’t remember what it was, but I think I was telling her how I was dreaming of spiders. And she said something to me about how when you see them, some people say it’s a sign that you’re confronting your shadow side. Or there’s some anxiety that’s going on in your life that you’re not dealing with. I really took that to heart. I was like, “OK, I can see that.”
So weirdly, when I started to see it that way, I became a person where I don’t kill bugs in my house anymore. And generally, if it’s a spider that’s not dangerous, I’ll just leave it alone, even cup it and take it outside usually. If I see someone kill an insect, I almost feel pain because that life has an equal purpose to mine. I see everything on that level.
But yeah, somehow my phobia transformed into something different because I spent that time kind of looking at myself. So when I thought about that, there’s something really primally creepy about bugs, they’re so different from our form. I mean, we can relate to dogs and cats. The appendages kind of do the same thing. The eyes are similar. There’s a relational thing there. And so I really just wanted to explore that juxtaposition of what if someone just didn’t have that primal fear? What if it was the exact opposite?
DC: How did you get into the horror genre? What was your introduction to horror?
EN: That is such a good question. My early entry points were through my dad watching The Stand when I was really little and introducing me to Stephen King and also through finding manga by Junji Ito in my teens. Other early influences were the movie Gozu and probably spending too much time watching David Firth animations on vintage Youtube.
Hilariously, I have a vague memory of going to a garage sale and finding this random book called Goodnight Moom by Jack MacLane when I was about 12 years old, which I think was the first ‘official’ horror novel I truly read. I remember the title because it reminded me of The Stand when Stu is constantly saying ‘M-O-O-N, that spells moon.’ I don’t even remember the storyline of that novel at this point but looking up the summary on Goodreads, I feel like this tracks.
Also, when I was a teenager, I stumbled upon Fight Club and other transgressive fiction, and I explored that world. When I think about exploring horror itself as a genre, what inspired me was that I just suddenly kind of realized that I watch so much horror, and I wasn’t consciously thinking about it. I was constantly looking for anything, because I started to realize that horror as a genre is one of the only places that people still will experiment and take these big risks, and they do it at these low budgets. I just loved that unsettling feeling that it could give me.
DC: Cool. So I always ask writers, what are some novels out there that you wish more people would read? Horror novels, specifically.
EN: I think my number one, actually two authors that I’m really excited about in the horror world right now are Charlene Elsby. She is writing violence in general like no one else that I have come across yet. It’s just so clever. She has a novel actually coming out. She’s got other work out, but she has one coming out in 2024 called Violent Faculties. When I read it, I was just floored. I really was just like, “This is the most clever fucking thing I’ve ever read.”
Then another author is B.R. Yeager. He wrote Negative Space, he’s just brilliant, too. I first came across him with Amygdalatropolis, and I was like, “I got to be this person’s friend. I got to find out who he is, what he writes, what he does.” They both just really excite me in the horror world. Oh, and also, Chris Kelso and Brian Evenson!
Deliver Me is available wherever you purchase your books.
Categorized:Interviews
