Insidious and filled with dread, Deliver Me is an uncompromising and unconventional horror. Written with tight, claustrophobic prose and a growing sense of impending danger, its a powerful and unsettling novel.
Between her relationship with ‘Daddy’, a reticent and uncaring boyfriend, and her job on the cutting line at a poultry factory, Dee-Dee (or Daisy) is a powerless participant in her own life. Terrified of Daddy leaving, she does whatever he asks, inured to his carelessness and enamoured by his potential to violence. It’s mirrored in her job, a mere numbered cog ruled by processing numbers and overbearing rules; a place that has so sanitised the mass killing of chickens in such huge quantities it barely registers. And this is Dee-Dee. Berated constantly by her religious mother and trapped in a bizarre emotional state of secrecy and fear and delusion and trauma and, ultimately, numbness.
When her childhood friend, Sloane reappears after twenty years, it opens up all of Dee-Dee’s caged desires and fantasies, morphing them into a reality with nightmarish consequences. After six miscarriages, Dee-Dee thinks she’s pregnant again. Desperate to become a mother, for her body to be seen as useful and fulfilled, to finally receive her own mother’s love and to complete the task the Pentecostal church programmed her to do, Dee-Dee knows that the only way to come to term is to believe it to be true. Even after she miscarries. But Sloane is pregnant too. Again. Her toddler daughter a constant reminder of her teenage pregnancy that was kept secret.
Almost as secret as Dee-Dee’s infatuation with Sloane. One that harbours strange, dark desires and violent jealousy. And the closer she gets to Sloane, the more memories unfurl, the more lies get told, the more truths are revealed. In a true feat of skill, the writing becomes more insistent, merging memories and fantasy into one claustrophobic passage. The clarity between things blur and memories become more clear, revealing things about Dee-Dee as unexpected as they are troubling. In a slow, almost imperceptible descent, the tone of the book changes from strange to creepy to deranged.
Yet it’s pervasive. From Dee-Dee’s childhood to her mother’s infatuation with the revivalist church they attended, her relationship with Sloane and Daddy and her complete obsession with bearing a child is all tangled up into one horrific knot of delusion and trauma. Wrapped up in notions of small town poverty, the invasive spite and hatefulness of everyone is overwhelming. The consideration of the human proclivity to create narratives about and around themselves, to live out falsehood fantasies is laid bare. Couched in religious virtue or intellectual superiority, there’s an awfulness to everyone as they use and abuse and strive to bootstrap themselves above the others any way they can. It’s a terrifying and insightful look into the cycle of abuse and violence, both mental and physical, and the fruits it bears. But, what is worse, is Dee-Dee’s complete lack of self-reflexion; an almost psychotic approach to her own existence written in with a compelling and consuming style.
Building toward an awful conclusion, the growing tension and dread that festers, becoming outright insane, is beautifully crafted. Strange and disturbing, yet completely engrossing, it’s a brilliant and powerfully crafted work of horror.
Review copy
Published by Verve Books
thebookbeard's Blog 