Mostly Dead Things

Kristen Arnett’s debut novel, Mostly Dead Things, is a book about the family dynamics that occur when everybody in the family has a different idea about what appropriate grief looks like. It centers around a family taxidermy shop taken over by the family’s eldest, Jessa, who took over the business after her father took his own life. In many ways it reminded me of Melissa Faliveno’s Hemlock, about a queer woman who returns to her family’s lake cabin in Northern Wisconsin several years after her mother died there several years earlier. There two characters are both queer, both drink too much and seem to favor beer, and both are haunted by how to remember their flawed but loved deceased parents. Jessa wants to remember her father as the careful craftsman, dedicated to the accuracy and dignity of the animals that come through his shop, by carrying on the trade. Conflict shows up immediately when her mother’s more artistic approach is a sharp rebuke of tradition and down-to-the-whisker…