Love was a broken telephone that refused to dial out.” Her longing for connection is deeply vulnerable and intensely relatable. Love was a punch in the gut that ruptured your spleen. Love, she says, “was the steady burn of acid indigestion. Arnett gives readers the sense that, as much as Jessa wants to move on from Brynn, something is holding her back, whether it’s a sense of commitment to her family and hometown or a fear of being vulnerable-especially as a queer woman in the deep south. To make things even more complicated, Brynn was also the love of Jessa’s life. He’s also still reeling from the sudden departure of his ex-wife, Brynn, even though she left years earlier. Meanwhile, Jessa’s brother Milo essentially checks out of his life, struggling to care for himself and his children. (One particular work features a photo of Libby’s deceased husband and a stuffed boar.) Her mother, Libby, takes to creating “art” that includes posing the shop’s taxidermy animals in sexually explicit positions, and the results are both hilarious and stomach-twisting. Jessa throws herself into her work, taking over the taxidermy business and longing to make her father proud-even posthumously. What follows is an engrossing exploration of grief, love and family, as the Mortons try to pick up the pieces after the death of their patriarch. The scene is a fittingly grotesque and unexpected opener for Mostly Dead Things, a morbid, inventive and darkly funny new novel by fiction writer and essayist Kristen Arnett. But when Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into her family’s taxidermy shop, she discovers that her father has killed himself on the very slab that they do their jobs on every day. It was supposed to be another normal day at work.

Book mostly dead things