Animals Eat Each Other - by Elle Nash (Paperback)

Number of Pages: 216
Genre: Fiction + Literature Genres
Sub-Genre: Literary
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Age Range: Adult
Author: Elle Nash
Language: English

About the Book

A girl with no name embarks on a three-way relationship with Matt, a satanist and a tattoo artist, and his girlfriend Frances, a new mom. The liason is caged by strict rules and rigid emotional distance. Nonetheless, it's all to 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 grow closer to Matt, she begins to recognize the dark undertow of obsession and jealousy that her presence has created between Matt and Frances, 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.

Book Synopsis

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)
In this 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 Frances, 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 Frances, 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.

Review Quotes

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

About the Author

Elle Nash is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and a fiction editor at Hobart Pulp. Her work has been featured in Cosmopolitan, Elle, NAILED, Reality Beach, Hobart, and other places. She was a member of the Denver Press Club and now lives in Arkansas. Occasionally she reads tarot in exchange for money.