Mostly Dead Things (2019) by Kristen Arnett

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Mostly Dead Things (2019)

by Kristen Arnett

2925 Corrine Drive, Orlando, Florida

Florida: 4/21

   I'll say that Florida has a lotta swamp action.  There are swamps and wetlands all up and down the coast of the United States- South Carolina, Maryland- plenty along the New England seacoast.  Psychically though, swamps are a small part of those other places whereas in Florida they take center stage from a literary imagination standpoint.  Mostly Dead Things, for example, is mapped onto Orlando, which is a major urban center of Florida, but I thought these people were out in the middle of nowhere, not stuck into a suburban neighborhood in a majorish American city.  

  Mostly Dead Things is interesting in that it is written by a coolish writer- Arnett has or had a column on LitHub, which is about as cool as it gets these days for literary fiction.  This novel has a queer protagonist and an interesting milieu- a family built around the now-deceased fathers' taxidermy business.  Arnett doesn't shy away from the gruesome stuff- not just the taxidermy material but also Arnett's frequent writing about the smell of sweaty armpits- at least a half dozen times in the 300 pages of this book.