“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.
But unlike many “sad girl” characters, Stuckes’s narrator isn’t affluent: the novel stresses the wealth gap between her and her peers and the dismal conditions of her bedsit. Her simmering hatred after the opening catastrophe, an event as nebulous as the sense of threat lurking in her “peripheral vision”, manifests as a literal and metaphorical sickness. She pukes, is riddled with aches and pains, and after “hacking” uncontrollably, her employers dismiss her.
Dead Animals’ theme of malady also has a supernatural bent. When the narrator’s life collides with Helene, the ex-girlfriend of her attacker, a series of strange events take hold: mould invades surfaces with impossible speed; crockery smashes of its own accord. Helene and the narrator’s trauma becomes the backbone of a turbo-charged, often toxic, romantic relationship, strengthened by a pact for revenge.
A four-time winner of the Foyle young poets award, Stuckes crafts a barbed character study, addressing the unease of existing in the female body, the “lack of humanity” of the gig economy and the numbness that follows trauma. Only its denouement feels unsteady, the culmination of its occult leanings snuffed out in one blow. Against a backdrop of wider violence against women, it ponders critical questions around where the anguish after male aggression is supposed to be vented – and how.
• Dead Animals by Phoebe Stuckes is published by Sceptre (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
