Never mind new animals: Ella Baxter’s debut novel looks at first to be a very familiar creature. Main character Amelia (surname Aurelia, a piece of whimsy explained by her taking her stepdad’s surname) is one of those fictional young women who lives in between the morbid and the erotic. She has outrageous sex to swallow her ineffable sadness, and though she’s from Australia rather than Ireland, she could have stepped from the pages of a Sally Rooney novel.
When we first meet her, she’s in bed with a man she barely knows: “We both watched patiently as he prodded my vagina with his hangnailed finger, and we took turns sighing mid-thrust.” She cajoles him into growling “I will ruin you” at her during intercourse, and after he has reluctantly provided satisfaction, she kicks him out and starts arranging her next hookup. In the morning, she’s ready for her job as a mortuary makeup artist, painting the dead into a simulation of their living selves.
