Animals Eat Each Other

by Elle Nash

Overview

In Elle Nash’s stunning and powerful debut, a girl with no name embarks on a fraught three-way relationship with Matt, a satanist and a tattoo artist, and his girlfriend Hannah, a new mom. The liaison is caged by strict rules and rigid emotional distance. Nonetheless, it’s all too easy to surrender to an attraction so powerful she finds herself erased, abandoning even her own name in favor of a new one: Lilith.

As Lilith grows closer to Matt, she begins to recognize the dark undertow of obsession and jealousy that her presence has created between Matt and Hanna, and finds herself balancing on a knife’s edge between pain and pleasure, the promise of the future and the crushing isolation of the present. With stripped-down prose and unflinching clarity, Nash examines madness in the wreckage of love, and the loss of self that accompanies it. Nash's work has been featured in Cosmopolitan, Elle, Marie Claire and others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945814075
Publisher:	Dzanc Books
Publication date:	04/03/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Elle Nash is the author of the poetry chapbook “i can remember the meaning of every tarot card but i can’t remember what i texted you last night” (Nostrovia! Press, 2016). She is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and a fiction editor at Hobart Pulp. Elle lives at the foot of the Rockies with her husband, his motorcycle and their two pets. Her work has appeared in Hobart Pulp, Blunderbuss Magazine, and Nailed.

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/08/2018
Nash’s brilliant and visceral debut novel follows a young woman’s increasingly complicated relationship with a young couple. The 19-year-old narrator, unnamed at first, has just finished high school and is working at a RadioShack in Colorado Springs. She has no plans for the future and lives with her largely absent mother, from whom she steals painkillers. One day at work, she meets Matt and Frankie, and the three bond over tattoos and metal music. From there, the relationship progresses quickly: Frankie names the narrator Lilith, and Matt and Lilith begin having sex while Frankie watches. Lilith simultaneously feels a sense of belonging and a sense of disembodiment: “I started to be it, started to be Lilith, whoever she was. Something about me slipped away, a letting go.... I could only see him and Frankie, myself an object to bring them pleasure. Benign neglect, how peonies thrive.” But the same recklessness that draws the three together eventually forges cracks in their shared relationship; Frankie is controlling, and Lilith’s forceful desire fuels the fire: “I wanted to know what it would be like to carry a bad habit all the way through.” Nash writes with psychological precision, capturing Lilith’s volatile shifts between directionless frustration, self-destructiveness, ambivalence, and vulnerable need. This is a complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire that gives new meaning to the famous quote often attributed to Oscar Wilde: “Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Nash writes with psychological precision, capturing Lilith’s volatile shifts between directionless frustration, self-destructiveness, ambivalence, and vulnerable need. A complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire."
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)


"Elle Nash's Animals East Each Other is a desire map, a cartography of eros. Two women and a man weave their contradictions and obsessions and aches into one another until names, bodies, and selves dissolve and reconstitute in ways they could not have imagined. Mirrorings, doublings, triplings, and reproductions bring the right questions to the surface: who are we when we enter into love stories? Does anyone know? A heartbomb."
-Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan



"Animals Eat Each Other reminds me of the 80s, with its Satanism and ménage à trois teen lifestyle and atheism in the face of mass Christianity. Elle Nash has written a novel you can't put down, even if the Satanic Bible or a deck of Tarot cards is within your reach."
-Elizabeth Ellen, author of Fast Machine

From the Publisher

2018-02-11
Nash's debut novel explores the territory between attraction and obsession with a healthy dose of apathy thrown in for good measure.Lilith is a poster child for disaffected youth growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in Colorado Springs in the early 2000s. A recent high school graduate, she lives in a dilapidated trailer park with her clinically depressed mother and, in between her shifts at RadioShack, spends her time drinking Robitussin and stealing her mother's Vicodin. A bitterly precise observer of the monoculture that surrounds her, Lilith is committed to whiling away her young adulthood in a haze of drugs, sex, late '90s shock rock, and plaintive tattoos until she meets Matt and Frankie, young parents in search of something new to spice up their relationship. What follows is an escalating series of encounters in which characters get tattoos, do drugs, have increasingly violent sex, and explore the boundaries of possession as Lilith tries to fill the "daddy-shaped hole" left by her father's death. Lilith's name is given to her by Frankie as a symbol of her "wild demon woman" nature, and, as the relationships among the trio deepen, the symbolism of this identity as an anti-Eve is played upon. Lilith is attracted to Frankie's poise and wants to possess her friendship; she is obsessed with Matt's eros and wants to possess his love; she is in turn both the dominant and the submissive in a series of sexually manipulative encounters with her friend Jenny; her RadioShack boss, Sam; her unnamed high school boyfriend; and Matt's friend Patrick. In short, she "[makes] a chaotic mess" of both her life and the lives of everyone around her. As the novel progresses, the characters' predictable changes of heart and the power dynamics that drive the plot become muddled by Nash's insistent return to Lilith's mantra of low self-esteem and a kind of hot-topic Satanism that stands in for a philosophical investigation into Lilith's inner life. While Nash's choice of the first-person narrator gives us a believable and at times engaging window into a specific subset of the early 21st century's version of corporate nihilism, the work as a whole is overshadowed by Lilith's unrelenting narcissism, which prevents the reader from forming any empathy with her point of view or sympathy for her eventual vulnerability.A self-indulgent novel about a self-indulgent character in which titillation trumps insight.

Kirkus Reviews