These descriptions are not extreme, but they are frequent, and endless repetition of words like muck & grime & puke & snot & blood & dank belabours the point. The swampy, muggy Floridian setting deliquescing roadkill the gross yet mundane details of human bodies – Arnett creates a pervasive grubbiness throughout. Emotionally closed off and numbing herself with alcohol, Jessa is only “mostly-dead”, as is her brother Milo. There are a lot of dead things in this book, usually animals, but also yards full of dead grass, dead neighbourhoods, dead relationships.

The book’s title can read “mostly dead-things” or “ mostly-dead things”. Interspersed flashbacks delve into Jessa’s childhood, and complicated relationships with both her father and Brynn. Several years later, Jessa and Milo’s father kills himself, leaving Jessa struggling to manage the family taxidermy business, and their mother channelling her pain into grotesque, pornographic art made from dead animal parts.Ī family unit devastated by these twin blows, the lost binary star at the centre of their collective orbit, is the main narrative strand. This awkward love triangle holds, barely, until one day Brynn abruptly walks out on them both, also abandoning her small children in the process. The narrator, Jessa, has only ever loved one woman, Brynn, but Brynn chose the more conventional life of marriage and babies offered by Jessa’s brother Milo (while continuing to have sex with Jessa on the sly). Instead, this is quite a dark story about a family of grieving, emotionally damaged people. Despite the neon bright cover that screams ‘Quirky! Funny!’, Mostly Dead Things is Mostly about Sad People, and I didn’t find much mirth in this debut (maybe a sardonic undercurrent, at best).

Book mostly dead things