![]() ![]() ” In the title of Parul Sehgal’s review in The New York Times, the novel is called a story of “taxidermy, love, and grief” with taxidermy operating as the contrasting, unexpected, odd man out in that otherwise classic literary equation. And, yes, its humor is as dark and glinting as the black plastic eye of a taxidermy ferret. ![]() most surprising first novels I’ve ever read” and Nylon describes it as “precisely as strange, riotous, searing, and subversive as you’d want it to be. Who would think to write about stuffing animal carcasses? suggest the incredulous tones that tinge many of the blurbs that pepper the novel’s dust jacket and pre-title page pages Karen Russell calls it “one of the strangest. The scene is one of many where the slicing, scraping, shaping, and mounting of dead things are described in painstaking and tender detail the novel’s pages are teeming with boars, birds, bears, baby raccoons and countless other creatures whose final breaths neither we nor Jessa-Lynn Morton, its protagonist, are privy to. ![]() At first blush, Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things is remarkable for the unexpectedness, the strangeness, the oddity at its heart after all, it opens with a scene of slicing into the skin of a dead deer with the same kind of care and love reserved for the most delicate of moments. ![]()
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