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A review by marthmuffins
Deliver Me by Elle Nash
4.0
Deliver Me - 4/5
Deliver Me is good, and it feels very unique in the pregnancy horror subgenre in that it's not specifically about body horror fears surrounding how your body changes, about having something growing inside you that moves your insides around, causes you pain, and so on, but about not having that and wanting it so much because all your worth has been assigned to being able to squeeze out a wean. You see, it's deliver me both in a giving birth sense and deliver me in a religious sense.
The whole novel is very grim, everyone here, even our protagonist, is a big shit and as we're trapped in a self-loathing closeted bi woman's head for 280 pages. It's also doing all the classic extreme horror tropes: animal slaughterhouse, bugs, unsafe medical procedures, manky flats/apartments, animals getting real bad stuff done to them, a scene with a tampon that I don't think would be advisable irl etc. It doesn't reach the extent which media like this can, it's honestly fairly restrained in comparison to other books in this space, but still makes it's presence known.
Additionally, like a lot of these sort of works, it's not that subtle. Thankfully subtilty deserves to be dead, although the book still does the thing I dislike were a character will monologue about a very specific current day thing, be that a headline topic or a way people express a set of ideas (manosphere dogshit in this book's case), which will definitely date the book faster than would've otherwise been hte case, although it's not nearly as egregious as some books I've read recently.
Overall though the book worked for me and I'd definitely recommend giving it a read if it sounds interesting!
Deliver Me is good, and it feels very unique in the pregnancy horror subgenre in that it's not specifically about body horror fears surrounding how your body changes, about having something growing inside you that moves your insides around, causes you pain, and so on, but about not having that and wanting it so much because all your worth has been assigned to being able to squeeze out a wean. You see, it's deliver me both in a giving birth sense and deliver me in a religious sense.
The whole novel is very grim, everyone here, even our protagonist, is a big shit and as we're trapped in a self-loathing closeted bi woman's head for 280 pages. It's also doing all the classic extreme horror tropes: animal slaughterhouse, bugs, unsafe medical procedures, manky flats/apartments, animals getting real bad stuff done to them, a scene with a tampon that I don't think would be advisable irl etc. It doesn't reach the extent which media like this can, it's honestly fairly restrained in comparison to other books in this space, but still makes it's presence known.
Additionally, like a lot of these sort of works, it's not that subtle. Thankfully subtilty deserves to be dead, although the book still does the thing I dislike were a character will monologue about a very specific current day thing, be that a headline topic or a way people express a set of ideas (manosphere dogshit in this book's case), which will definitely date the book faster than would've otherwise been hte case, although it's not nearly as egregious as some books I've read recently.
Overall though the book worked for me and I'd definitely recommend giving it a read if it sounds interesting!