Mostly Dead Things

What a quirky book! It definitely has its fair share of twists and turns and I never knew what might happen next. It is a deeply grounded and human book. Grounded in people, humanity, and mistakes. It seems that “strange” and “weird” are the words used most often to describe this book and it is that but it is much more about real mistakes, reckonings and how a trade or daily practice can settle and sustain and give order to a life.
Jessa has so much to deal with but I felt that she was such a wonderful grounded character through all of it. You get the dynamic of her relationships, with her brother, her mother, and her brother's wife.
I wasn't sure I was going to like this book but I really did

There are books that you read, and there are books that you sense, vivid and visceral, getting into your every pore. You watch the story unfold, and humidity sticks the hair to the back of your neck, and the taste of cold coffee coats your tongue, and your nose fills with the smells of stagnant water and old garbage and stale sweat. Stories you feel like a bruise, that cling to your skin long after you finish the plot, like the memory of the lip gloss of the first girl you ever kissed.

Mostly Dead Things is a book like that.

Kristen Arnett’s debut novel opens with an animal autopsy as a way of introducing a suicide, and only gets darker and weirder from there. It focuses on the Morton family taxidermy shop through the eyes of daughter Jessa-Lynn, the heir to her late father’s business and talent. In the wake of her father’s sudden suicide, Jessa tries to take on the role he left behind, managing the business and stepping up to support what’s left of her family, which is falling apart at the seams.

Her mother channels her grief into hypersexualized art using the shop’s taxidermied animals. Her brother Milo drifts, showing up only occasionally for Jessa, their mother, and his children. Milo’s daughter Lolee and stepson Bastien run rampant, wild and flirting with danger in the way that only young people in pain can be.

Loss hangs through the entire book, as thick and permeating as the Florida humidity that Arnett describes with the loving familiarity of a local. There’s the loss of the Morton patriarch, yes, but just as cutting is the absence of Brynn, Milo’s wife and Jessa’s best friend--and what? Lover is too simple a word--and Lolee and Bastien’s mother, who walked out on the family years before. As the story unfolds, the threads of Brynn’s loss and Prentice’s weave together, and we see how interconnected pain can be.

One of the most incredible aspects of this novel was how very brilliantly it portrayed the ways we can appear to function while we simultaneously fall apart. Arnett doesn’t gloss over how very unpretty this process of self-destruction can be. She doesn’t write HBO-style depression, slim and manicured and sexy: this is room-temperature beer drunk at three in the afternoon and eight in the morning, too-strong coffee with the grounds stuck in your teeth, flies buzzing around the trash built up in your kitchen, the smell of rotten fruit and spoiled takeout in your fridge. Depression is never named, but Jessa’s stagnant lack of care for her body, her home, anything but getting through her day and keeping her business afloat is so vivid and visceral it nearly jumps off the page.

Mostly Dead Things has been called “a love letter to Florida” and “an eccentric look at loss and love,” and it’s both, in so many ways. It’s sexual and intimate, sensual but not sexy--the sex scenes are sticky and wet, tinged with the strawberry lip gloss of first kisses and prickling anxiety of breathing in the expensive perfume of a woman you know is out of your league, and there is never a sense of titillation. The queerness of the book simply is, infused into the text right there with the grief and the heat and the beer and the trips to 7/11 for bottomless coffee.

This book made me laugh, made me cringe, made me wince, made me sweat, made me cry. It made my heart ache, and made me feel deeply seen in a way that I haven’t in a long, long time. Jessa’s experience is a million miles from mine, but I felt close to her, and when the story ended, I almost felt like I was losing a friend. And to my total surprise, despite the strange, dark humor that permeated every inch of the story (and I could write a whole other blog post on just the humor, god, this book is so grossly funny in all the worst ways, it’s delightful), I ended it feeling…optimistic. Like things might somehow work out.

Mostly Dead Things left me feeling bruised, exhausted, shockingly hopeful, and absolutely immersed in cravings for beer, grease, and a trip to somewhere swampy and warm. It’s a 2019 must-read.

What I liked about Arnett’s novel was the depth brought to her characters that muddied the line between identifying the right or wrongness of choices. Set within a sticky, nostalgic Florida, Mostly Dead Things is a study of the way people who are existing with grief simultaneously conflict with each other; one character deals with grief by forefronting the memories of loved ones who abandoned them above the presence of those who stayed; another uses art to unearth the ugliness of a spouse who’s passed away. The clashing of these perceptions ultimately result in characters confronting the ways in which their beliefs mirror or fail to hold up to truth.

Instead of concealing flaws for the sake of creating personas that the reader aspires to identify with, Arnett sets their weaknesses center stage. Characters become vulnerable to the reader and each other, creating a narrative that is consistently unwinding time and memory to allow relationships to heal. Mostly Dead Things is a deeply vivid novel that is unrelentingly honest and optimistic in its uncertainty.

This was a great read! I started the book thinking I knew what was going to happen, but Arnett added twists and turns that kept me engaged the whole time. I particularly enjoyed her use of taxidermy and the family business as a way of demonstrating the loss and changes that Jessa and her family go through following the suicide of her father. The book dealt incredibly with the ways in which life simultaneously goes on with potential and also seems to have ended completely in the wake of the death of a loved one.

Amazing, odd book that doesn’t rely on oddity (in this case taxidermy) to get into the characters‘ heads and their relationships with each other. The metaphor of skins (or carapaces) for emotional layers is perfect.

A strange and beautiful tale of darkness, mourning, and love. And also taxidermy. Delightfully quirky and absolutely worth your time.

A strange and strangely moving debut by Kristen Arnett. Known for her peculiar and wry Florida brand of humor on Twitter, this novel is less outwardly funny, and ends up being a surprisingly introspective look at grief, love, and the pieces of ourselves we give up for other people.