A review by jiyoung
Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett

2.0

Occasionally funny though ultimately contrived. The drama felt as staged as the taxidermied menagerie; I couldn’t fully invest in the Mortons’ psychological turmoil as it vacillated between the cartoonish and the cliché. Arnett does have a knack for writing about viscera while there are some concise prose gems throughout (e.g., “Nothing made an animal look less alive than tension leaked from the spine”). The book doesn’t evolve much beyond its narrow gimmick of dead animal erotica, unfortunately.