The other great lost love of Jessa’s life is Brynn, hopelessly entangled with both Morton siblings since childhood. Receipts slid along the dashboard with a satisfying hiss every time he’d turn a corner or switch lanes.” Jessa recalls roadkill-harvesting missions on which father and daughter rode in happy silence in a truck that “smelled like gasoline and heated vinyl. By carrying on her father’s business, Jessa intends to preserve in formaldehyde the memory of a loving but inflexible patriarch, who would have preferred that his shiftless son Milo follow in the family trade but ultimately settled for turning his daughter into his “little miniature.” Arnett adeptly captures the comfort an odd, unfeminine girl might find in this model of close-mouthed masculinity. 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.

Mostly dead things by kristen arnett