Mostly Dead Things

April 15, 2019
In Arnett’s dark and original debut, Jessa discovers her father dead of a suicide in the family’s Florida taxidermy shop. She also finds a note asking her to take care of the failing business, her mother, and her brother, Milo. Additionally, Jessa mourns the loss of Brynn, her brother’s (now) ex-wife and Jessa’s longtime lover, who left both her and Milo years before. As Jessa grieves over her lost loved ones, she must also deal with her remaining ones: Milo sinks from the world, missing work and barely paying attention to his children, and Jessa’s mother enters a late creative period, using the stuffed and mounted animals from the shop to make elaborate sexual tableaus for a local art gallery. Jessa also begins a romantic relationship with Lucinda, the director of the gallery and benefactor for Jessa’s mother’s newfound (and, for Jessa, “perverted”) artistry. Set in a richly rendered Florida and filled with delightfully wry prose and bracing honesty, Arnett’s novel introduces a keenly skillful author with imagination and insight to spare.

Narrator Jesse Vilinksky gives a wistful performance of Arnett's debut novel. After her father's suicide, Jessa-Lynn Morton takes over running the family taxidermy shop, drinks too much, and ignores her own grief as well as the disappearance of her brother's wife, Brynn, who was also Jessa's first love. It's a dark story filled with damaged characters, and Vilinsky's melancholy narration highlights the fact that Jessa is deeply depressed, a reality Jessa herself can't acknowledge. Other characters, mostly members of the Morton family, are easily distinguishable, thanks to Vilinksy's fully developed voices. Some of the novel's wry humor is lost in Vilinksy's performance, but she fully captures the emotional core of this story about family and the strange contours of grief. E.C. � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine