Like mediums and morticians, taxidermists hold a uniquely proprietary relation to the dead. It’s also a bottomless source of metaphor for Arnett-sometimes forced, but just as often fertile It’s an art, and even a kind of nurture: “Animals that might have weathered into nothing got to live on indefinitely through our care,” Jessa says. To its protagonist and her author, taxidermy is no joke. Despite its raw materials, it is neither a slab of Southern Gothic nor a zany romp through the land of Florida Man. So begins Mostly Dead Things, the first novel by the writer and Twitter virtuoso Kristen Arnett. For her daughter, Jessa Morton, it’s one more thing to deal with on top of her father’s recent suicide and her less-recent abandonment by her lover, who was also her brother’s wife. It’s another morning in small-town Central Florida, and outside the local taxidermy shop stands a middle-aged woman in a nightgown and fuzzy slippers, tapping a cigarette into a coffee mug and admiring the pornographic window display she’s created with the shop’s wares.
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