Dead Animals

There is something creeping at the edge of your vision, lingering somewhere just out of focus. All it would take is to let your mind wander, to let it come into view.

A young woman wakes after a house party with scratches and bruises - and a gap in her memory.

As the violent truth comes back to her - a series of events she struggles to name - her anger grows.

Solace comes in the form of enigmatic, captivating Helene, who knows what the man at the party did, has suffered at his hands too. An act of violence demands one in return and Helene is planning revenge.

But who can afford to ask for justice, when the cost is murderously high?

A blistering, almost unbearably tense read i
Searing . . . 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 -- Miriam Balanescu Observer
A brilliant, chilling, furious novel. Real, relatable, and unputdownable -- Rachel Long, author of My Darling from the Lions
Dead Animals is a novel about trauma and sexual violence. Yet, in the same way Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You exceeded the bounds of the term 'post-MeToo narrative', Stuckes' book is generically slippery and hard to pin down. Dead Animals is as much a novel about hospitality work, disaffection, privilege, the rental market, and supernatural hauntings as it is about sexual trauma. Or perhaps it is all of these things bound together that make it such a powerfully compelling work of queer horror -- Eloise Hendy Dazed
A brutal, blistering horror story about precarious lives. Part Eileen, part Carrie. I gulped it down -- Clare Pollard, author of Delphi
Dead Animals is a novel about peripheries: the thing flickering at the corner of your vision, which is also the corner you can't get yourself out of without the buoyancy aid of money, class and privilege . . . This novel makes livid the faultlines of power, in gripping, distinctive prose -- Noreen Masud, author of A Flat Place
Dead Animals sinks its teeth into you on the first page and doesn't let go for the duration. Stuckes writes equally vividly on the traumas of love and abuse, the indignities of restaurant work and the off-kilter beauty of feeling forever out of place, half understood. A pitch-dark, pitch-perfect literary horror, haunted by a righteous anger that spirals out into the world indefinitely -- Luke Kennard, author of The Transition
Dead Animals is creepy, claustrophobic and deeply unsettling. The prose is razor-sharp and the overall effect is intoxicating. -- Kylie Whitehead, author of Absorbed
I devoured it. It's sparse, haunting and gripping -- Cecilia Knapp, author of Pig Peach
I felt every sentence inside my body as if I was living it. I thought the characters were so believably dark and seductive, and the narrator's grief and confusion around her assault so crushingly relatable -- Rose Wilding, author of Speak of the Devil
Stuckes deftly balances violence and wit, self-consciousness and panache. She can turn a sentence on a dime -- Kim Addonizio

Phoebe Stuckes is a writer from West Somerset living in London. She was commended by the UEA New Forms Award and shortlisted for The PFD Queer Fiction Prize in 2022. Dead Animals is her first novel.

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