I don't know how I feel about this book.
It explores some very tough topics with some sensitivity. I definitely connected with the main character, the way they needed people to like them, to see them. I felt raw when I finished the book.
That being said, some of the elements with Matt and Frances were a bit clumsy and the direction felt inevitable and some of the scenes felt quite gratuitous, but that in itself is a device within this book.

There's already a special place in my heart for this novel; for me, it's been an inspiration to draw-out stories from within myself to put ink-on-paper/pixels-on-screen...

The characters have been so carefully constructed and are full of depth from the moment they appear to the moment they disappear, naturally brought to the storyline as if they existed in real-life and were relatable to the author's self in one form or another.

Heavily drawing life into an ethos of colourful characters from the secluded space of a real-life small community in the heart of America has worked brilliantly in feeding my soul with the want, need, desire, for more of the same...

With many cultural references afoot (just one of the relatable reasons) to bring about the belief of current-day on-going (presumably) realities (for Americans at least, many things haven't - yet - been brought over to us in the UK), this novel is soaked in a preemptive setting for what is about to be experienced in a hundred-and-something pages of:

- 'Third-eye'-opening poetry ("In pain all senses are heightened. The mind has to go deeper than the immediate to be okay.", "Jealousy is the admission to yourself that you are replaceable.", to quote just a few);
- A feast of soul-feeding, thoroughly-descriptive, sexy, love-yearning, scenes throughout; for me, 'From Feathers' and 'Self Deceit is Not Undefiled Wisdom' were two awesomely killer chapters as a (family) man that could relate to the read;

There are many more positive and wonderful things I could say about this novel, from an author of whom has now opened for me the doors to a world of similar authors, (aspiring-to-be) writers and followers-of-authors, but seeing as this novel is yet to be released (as of today, 10th March 2019) all I will say is go and experience this for yourselves, and come back to me with all the suggestions in the world for anything similar because I want more and I want it as soon as more is available..

Thank goodness, for the time being, I can seek out fellow authors, like Elle Nash, through her social media followers, tweets, and re-tweets, as well as her Publisher: 404 Ink; and according to the back pages, Dzanc Books of whom first published the material.

Unflinching, unfiltered and unwavering. The only words I could use to describe this sucker punch of a novel. Nothing about it is subtle but the way Nash writes in often very graphic detail just feels so seamless.

I'm still unsure about how I feel about this title and it left me with more questions than answers but I would undoubtedly recommend itto others, if only for the ending.

This is a novel about consumption. It is a novel about eating away at the basest parts of what makes up the self and gnawing our way into the lives of others, leaving irrevocable worm-holes of damage in our wake. This is a novel about what happens when we go so deep into another or so far away from who we are that darkness descends and we can not find our own way back.

I received a copy of this book and started reading it less than an hour later, so sure that this was going to be a five star read. But what I thought I signed up for was not what was delivered, in actuality.

My problem with this book stemmed not from its erotic nature but that I struggled to understand what the purpose of it all was. The dark subject matter provided no concluding, redeeming arc or - which I would have as equally preferred - an entire shunning of the societal system that deems the antics that take place so taboo in the first place.

There was so much pain, in every facet of every characters life, and whilst Nash bluntly confronted this with an abstract sort of beauty that I greatly appreciated, for me, the novella went no further than this. The story was one of bleak and unending sadness and I wondered what I was supposed to take away from that except more of the same.

Animals Eat Each Other is a short novel about desire and pushing things to extremes. A nameless narrator begins a fraught relationship with a couple, Matt and Frances, who have a new baby and a taste for home tattooing. Alongside this, she has casual sex with her boss, Sam, and her friend, Jenny. Despite settling into routines with Matt and Frances, she can't quite find the position she wants within their relationship and the novel becomes a look at love, darkness, and jealousy.

This is a stylistic novel, sparsely written at times with Biblical and Satanic imagery and an underlying sense of darkness. The narrator is a gripping character, getting tangled up with many people but also staying detached from them, and it can be easy to feel frustrated at her actions. In many ways it is quite a hopeless novel, with a lingering darkness and primal instinct; indeed, the title is very fitting. It has a very classic cult novel feel at times, particularly in its ambivalent ending and style.

This is a book with a very specific vibe—the movement between unfeeling action and desperate obsession, helped along by sex and drugs—which won't appeal to everyone. However, it is clear that for some people it'll be powerful and explosive, proof that fiction full of sex and violence and drugs doesn't have to be a male-dominated realm.

When I was at Cambridge there was only really one fellow, John Lennard, who had any time for openly genre fiction (I would hope, with limited confidence, that it's a different story now). And one of the things he'd talk about was how any book is made up of the alphanumeric code, the string of text which it contains, but also of the lexical code, which is everything else surrounding it. The example he gave was that you'd respond to Kafka's Metamorphosis very differently if, instead of the usual washed-out modern art cover, it had a lurid pulp image of the family being menaced by an enormous beetle. Bringing this back to Animals Eat Each Other: this was in the General Fiction and LGBTQIA sections on Netgalley, and the forthcoming UK edition has an artsy blue cover featuring an enthusiastic quote from Lidia Yuknavitch. But reading it, especially early on, there were times I wondered if it wouldn't have been just as happy under a cover which had intertwined bodies against a dark background, and filed as Erotica. This isn't a diss, far from it; plenty of filth is wiser about the ways of the heart and the brain, let alone other organs, than plenty of litfic. And let's face it, I was always going to be an easy sell for anything which opens on a threesome involving a knife. It's very good on the way lovers reimagine each other, how a pet name is a subtle form of magic, and how the more people are engaged in that working, the stronger it binds. I was reminded of the Darcey Steinke line, "Sex is a kind of alchemy. It’s the one thing other than death that if used properly can change everything". Though this is also, alas, a story of the times the magic doesn't work, burns too fast for some and is fractured in its foundation by the doubts and ulterior motives of others. Perhaps that's where the distinction lies: the difference between erotica, and cult fiction with a lot of sex, is that erotica ends happily.