“At the end of my suffering / there was a door,” begins the epigraph – from a Louise Glück poem – in Phoebe Stuckes’s debut novel. Set in the aftermath of an assault at a party, leaving the book’s protagonist “adorned with floral bruises”, as if she had “crawled through the woods”, the slim but searing Dead Animals looks for an outlet for pent-up rage.
Stuckes’s story slots pretty neatly into the so-called “sad girl novel” category (in which often privileged women face mental health crises – see Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation). It follows an unnamed waitress at a slick west London restaurant, jaded under its “brutal regime”, who relays her story with a glacial impassiveness, brisk sentences heaped together breathlessly without punctuation.
