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The Deer
The Deer is a rhythmic, surrealist psychological thriller about a physicist who hits—what appears—to be a deer. As he returns from the scene of the accident to his childhood home, long-forgotten memories flood his consciousness, and he must come to terms with the fact that his past, and reality as he knows it, are not what they appear. Part experimental film, part jazz record, but always lyrical, luminous, and austere, The Deer is a poignant meditation on familial love, loss, and the mystery at the heart of existence.
- GenresNovellaContemporary
142 pages, Paperback
First published August 2, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
March 13, 2023
An experimental novella that reads like a David Lynch movie. It is structured as a record album.
In Side A we are in the confused head of a deeply troubled, disoriented man who appears to have just come back to his childhood home bury his (abusive) father. He doesn't think straight. It's like a fever dream and it is quite tiring and confusing. Memories constantly intertwine with reality. He may have hit a deer with his car and he probably had been drinking. It is all set in the dark woods and the police are questioning him.
One has to be in the mood for this. I could appreciate it to some extent, but it shouldn't have been any longer than the 60 or so pages it counts.
Side B is an apocalyptic story, but it cost me too much energy to try and make sense of it..
Not my kind of book, but if you are into David Lynch then go for it.
Thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC.
In Side A we are in the confused head of a deeply troubled, disoriented man who appears to have just come back to his childhood home bury his (abusive) father. He doesn't think straight. It's like a fever dream and it is quite tiring and confusing. Memories constantly intertwine with reality. He may have hit a deer with his car and he probably had been drinking. It is all set in the dark woods and the police are questioning him.
One has to be in the mood for this. I could appreciate it to some extent, but it shouldn't have been any longer than the 60 or so pages it counts.
Side B is an apocalyptic story, but it cost me too much energy to try and make sense of it..
Not my kind of book, but if you are into David Lynch then go for it.
Thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC.
August 6, 2022
The fact that Dashiel Carrera’s debut novel, The Deer (2022), was published by Dalkey Archive Press, a literary giant who has been at the forefront of postmodern and experimental fiction’s rise in popularity and esteem, is nothing to ignore. Boasting a large catalog of works by such eminent authors as John Barth, David Markson, and Marguerite Young, Dalkey Archive is a publisher whose releases come with an implied guarantee of literary merit. However, from its dependence on narrative and stylistic clichés and an undemanding and seemingly inconsequential story, The Deer struggled to convince me that it’s worthy to be among such high company.
Structured as a vinyl record, the novel is broken into two main sections, Side A and Side B, which are further fractured into sections titled Tracks and Lessons, respectively. A third section, Hidden Track, is sheltered between the two Sides. Why Carrera chose this structure remains unclear, as music doesn’t seem to have much relevance to the story at all aside from occasional references to characters singing songs from the “Before Times” (more on that below), listening to jazz, or not remembering how to play the piano. Carrera is also a musician with several albums under his belt, though, so perhaps the choice was inspired by the comfort of familiarity. Regardless, I wasn’t able to draw any real connections between the story and its musical structure, which unfortunately added to my early suspicion that Carrera wasn’t really sure what he wanted to accomplish with this novel.
Side A concerns Henry Haverford, a mentally unsound physicist who strikes a deer on his way home from an academic conference (or, in an alternative account, on the way to his brother Arthur’s house to attend his father’s funeral). Haverford’s profession launches the most egregious of the novel’s reliances on psychological thriller clichés: a passing familiarity with the theoretics behind Schrodinger’s Cat, which Carrera attempts to cite as the explanation behind Haverford’s confusing narration that resides somewhere in the dark dissonance between his memory and the reality around him. While using Schrodinger’s Cat as a basis for narrative fog isn’t a crime in itself, it’s certainly not original. In fact, because Carrera doesn’t dive any deeper into the physics than an explanation you’d get from the average high school student, it comes across as a little silly. Unlike the excellent fusion science and fiction in Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (2020), Carrera’s name-dropping of Schrodinger seems only to suggest some kind of intelligent connection between his novel and the physicist’s theories without actually delivering on that suggestion.
The first mention of Schrodinger comes very early, right after Haverford’s crash, as he speaks with a policeman. “What do you do? Physics, I say. Like a teacher? No, more like research. Research, he laughs. Like test tubes? Like Schrodinger, I say. Quantum. Fancy, he says” (6). The cop’s remark is undoubtedly meant to speak for readers, as well. “Fancy,” we are supposed to think, that Carrera would mention a physicist like Schrodinger in his novel. Another instance comes a bit later, as Haverford reminisces about his time with Finny, a female character who is shrouded in the mystery of Haverford’s warped perspective but who seems to have been his girlfriend/wife. Haverford recounts, “Finny used to tell me I shouldn’t think too much. When you think too much, she’d say, it’s just like that puzzle with the cat you’re always talking about. That Schrodinger thing. You end up in two places at once... A person can’t exist in two places, she’d say. It splits them in two” (30). A very on-the-nose passage for a novel that shifts between opposing realities, which may be forgivable in a longer, more in-depth novel, but The Deer clocks in at only 144 pages, making short passages like this the extent of Carrera’s exploration of the idea.
Following his auto accident, Haverford is taken to Arthur’s home, where the two begin discussing their father’s funeral – the reality and date of which, as Haverford’s sanity spirals, is also put into question. In a scene recalling Kafka’s The Trial, Haverford is (falsely?) accused of murder, presumably the same accident where he killed the deer (if the deer actually existed at all). He is later sexually assaulted by one of the policemen, which parallels Side A’s other focus: the abuse Haverford suffered at the hands of his father, which continues to haunt him and is, as far as the narrative reveals, the reason for his mental instability. While the lingering effects of child abuse are yet another predictable cliché of the psychological thriller genre, Carrera worsens the offense by adding another predictable detail: Haverford’s father was a police officer. Most likely a figment of Haverford’s imagination rather than a true memory, the novel also introduces the idea that Arthur—until this point Haverford’s main tie to reality—joined in their father’s abuse. He thinks, “[Arthur]’d hold me down while my father ran his fingers along the inside of my – along the inside of my groin and wrapped his fingers around my cock,” an unsettling memory sparked by a separate memory of a sexual encounter with Finny in which her touch reminds him of his father’s (65). This description is perhaps the single moment in Side A that delivers on the novel’s horror/thriller atmosphere, but as with the rest of its prose, it still lacks a certain deftness to completely pull off its intentions. In other words, there is no substantial preparation or reason for this revelation, and it comes across as ham-fisted shock value.
Haverford’s narration soon loses all distinguishability between reality and memory, as his section ends with the Schrodinger-inspired back-and-forth of different responses to the same questions during a final police interrogation over whether or not he killed that deer after all. “Why did you speed up?” one policeman asks. “I sped up so that I could see the blood of the deer. I thought it would be beautiful,” he replies. Then, on the next line, his response changes to “I didn’t speed up” (78). As I said before, this sort of dissonance could be interesting if written well, but it provides nothing further to explore, no deeply buried gems to mine from the text. Unlike similar novels that force you to ask “Is this really happening?” like Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), or even Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), The Deer’s story isn’t interesting enough, or its prose strong enough, to make you care about solving the mystery, and upon a first-read it's questionable whether there is a mystery to solve at all.
Ultimately, the killing of the deer is inconsequential and serves mostly as a parallel to another narrative detail running throughout Haverford’s narration—the memory of his dog’s death, almost assuredly at the hands of his father, being blamed on him. Whether Haverford killed the deer with his car should be irrelevant to the police officers who are interrogating him, of course. But to Haverford, who is haunted by the accusation made against him in childhood, it means everything. Disbelief in his innocence of killing the dog is also disbelief in the reality of his father’s abuse. If his father was not responsible for killing the dog, he also wasn’t responsible for the sexual abuse, and this possibility fuels Haverford’s insanity. If Haverford killed the deer, then he also killed his dog, which therefore leaves his father innocent, at least in everyone’s eyes except his own.
Hidden Track, which presumably depicts Haverford’s father moments after slaughtering their dog, opens with two very questionable sentences which raise a further issue with the novel: “The man sits. He sits on a log” (83). Obviously a stylistic choice, the prose is full of unnecessarily choppy and redundant sentences like these, and despite the novel’s brevity they become tedious to read. Alternatively, in passages where Carrera wants to heighten the narration's incoherence, he writes in sparsely punctuated polysyndeton. While most authors marry subject to style, it's so obvious in The Deer that it borders on yet another cliché of debut novel writing: thinking that a chaotic switch in style shows brilliance. For example, take this passage from the end of Side A's Track 1:
"...when I got the glass out from the refrigerator the glass slipped into the sink and shattered and the white eyes of our dog blinked in the dark and as I reached down the door upstairs strained a long resounding creak that like the rushing of the sink over the knife I could live in, that I could spend eternity with and float with like an astronaut in a lake and never ever come to the crashing, deafening thud that now rains kitchen light dust on a knife doused in bubbles" (22).
Side B, arguably the more interesting of the two sections but also the most incoherent, is narrated by an unnamed woman who cares for her ailing Mother and her younger Sister. This section is undoubtedly indebted to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), from the unnamed characters to the post-apocalyptic ash floating throughout many scenes. The narrator, Sister, and Mother live in poverty brought about by a severe drought that has turned their location (left unspecified) into a survivalist wasteland. It’s the narrator’s literal and symbolic desire for water—for life, for growth—that drives this section. The narrator often remembers (or fantasizes?) about the pre-apocalyptic “Before Time” when water was still abundant. However, like most things in The Deer, it isn’t entirely clear whether the drought is real or just a figment of the narrator’s imagination. At one point, she joins Sister, who is experiencing the early days of her womanhood, in the shower to wash menstrual blood from her legs. Is it common to take a shower during a severe drought? Do water pipes still work during a post-apocalypse? Based on context, the scene takes place in the “real” present day, when water is so sparse that the narrator gets stuck in their well while trying to secure more of it, yet they are able to shower, cook, and wash dishes? Details like this aren’t explained, and since the novel doesn’t delve any deeper into them than surface-level narrative contradictions, they’re less intriguing than just frustrating.
As the narrator and Sister await Mother’s death (a doctor visits them regularly and insists that she doesn’t have much time left to live, leaving us to question why there are doctors in this wasteland at all), the narrator writes a novel (this novel?) on Polaroid pictures that have faded into blankness, cooks eggs for Sister, and reads stories from the “Old Book,” which seems to be both a book of fairy tales a la the Brothers Grimm and a science textbook from which they understand the world, apparently lacking any real education. Like McCarthy’s father and son in The Road, the narrator and Sister struggle to survive the drought as ash and smoke from distant forest fires encompass them. Like Side A, though, all of Side B’s narrative intrigue is lessened by its clunky prose. For example, after Mother’s death (which is questionable, as well, because she reappears only a few pages later, seemingly healthy and in the same linear timeline of the events when she finally passed away), the narrator and Sister begin trekking across the landscape towards the source of smoke they see on the horizon from their house at the edge of the woods. The narrator says, “We stop for lunch but have no food.” Then only sentences later: “I pour the dried kernels [of popcorn] into the pot… Sister and I pass a loaf back and forth. It dries our mouths, but we must eat” (127–128). So do they have food or not? As with details of the drought, the contradictions in The Deer don’t inspire rereading or contemplation; instead, they come across as simple mistakes of a first-time writer who hadn’t fully thought out what he was writing. The mystique of ambiguity is lost in the unfortunate fact that you don’t really care whether there is anything left to explore or not, and since the novel is billed as a psychological thriller it becomes apparent that Carrera wasn’t too worried about these details because any narrative shortcomings could be blamed on its “intentional” incoherence. Instead, it seems more like any sentences that sound cool, such as "We stop for lunch but have no food," were thrown in for atmospheric effect without any regard to whether they actually made sense within the context of the story.
Like Haverford, the narrator of Side B also spirals into complete mental instability, switching back and forth between her dual realities in nearly every paragraph. At one point, she suggests that Sister is only a figment of her imagination, saying, "How strange it has been to talk to you, knowing that you do not exist. That you are just a memory in a photograph, a faded image which I hold so dearly at the bottom of a well" (143). Of course, there are no other apparent indications of Sister's inexistence than this one, which left me to question why Carrera included it at all. Perhaps as a Fight Club or Shutter Island-esque twist? It reads like an unprompted detail meant only to make you reread the novel, but since a character only existing in the narrator's head is yet another trope of psychological thrillers, I kept that idea in mind from the beginning of Side B and saw nothing that would suggest a revelatory re-understanding of the novel if viewed from that perspective.
As Side B's narrator wraps up her section of the novel, a final example of Carrera's dependence on cliché overtakes the story. Mother, still dying in her bed, inexplicably hands the narrator a page from the Old Book. The page, quoted at length, explains the “psychology” behind the narrator's cognitive dissonance. The quote begins and ends:
“As in example (A), the subject in this passage experiences a succession of ‘echoes’—memories which have repeated themselves so often in the subject’s conscience they have now spilled out into sensory experience. Often these echoes arise as a defense mechanism, allowing the subject to take refuge from the turmoil of their present by immersing themselves in the past… This tendency to prefer the impression of the experience to the actual soon overtakes the subject’s mind such that they are drowning in impressions and abstractions, holding each new experience aloft as if some strange spectacle, alive but not alive, afraid but not afraid, dead but—” (141–142).
Not only is this explanation another undeserved reference to Schrodinger, it’s also another tiring cliché of the thriller genre (is anyone keeping count?), something that Hitchcock’s Psycho first perfected in 1960. At the risk of the reader/viewer not understanding what has already been made obvious, the story explains itself to us explicitly. Rather than “Norman Bates is insane and adopts his dead mother’s persona,” though, Carrera tells us that the narrator is so desperate to relive the better days of her life that she often believes she is still within them, ignoring the reality (?) of her current situation. Although I hate to use the word "pretentious," this final detail puts the nail in the coffin for Carrera's understanding and portrayal of psychology and physics in The Deer. Anyone can cite these things in their novel, and without providing some sort of reason for citing them, they only serve to make the story sound more intelligent than it really is, which although not uncommon for debut novelists, is neither fair to, nor fun for, the reader.
The Deer is out from Dalkey Archive Press. Despite my grievances with the novel, I wish to thank Dalkey for being kind enough to send me an advanced review copy of the book.
Structured as a vinyl record, the novel is broken into two main sections, Side A and Side B, which are further fractured into sections titled Tracks and Lessons, respectively. A third section, Hidden Track, is sheltered between the two Sides. Why Carrera chose this structure remains unclear, as music doesn’t seem to have much relevance to the story at all aside from occasional references to characters singing songs from the “Before Times” (more on that below), listening to jazz, or not remembering how to play the piano. Carrera is also a musician with several albums under his belt, though, so perhaps the choice was inspired by the comfort of familiarity. Regardless, I wasn’t able to draw any real connections between the story and its musical structure, which unfortunately added to my early suspicion that Carrera wasn’t really sure what he wanted to accomplish with this novel.
Side A concerns Henry Haverford, a mentally unsound physicist who strikes a deer on his way home from an academic conference (or, in an alternative account, on the way to his brother Arthur’s house to attend his father’s funeral). Haverford’s profession launches the most egregious of the novel’s reliances on psychological thriller clichés: a passing familiarity with the theoretics behind Schrodinger’s Cat, which Carrera attempts to cite as the explanation behind Haverford’s confusing narration that resides somewhere in the dark dissonance between his memory and the reality around him. While using Schrodinger’s Cat as a basis for narrative fog isn’t a crime in itself, it’s certainly not original. In fact, because Carrera doesn’t dive any deeper into the physics than an explanation you’d get from the average high school student, it comes across as a little silly. Unlike the excellent fusion science and fiction in Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (2020), Carrera’s name-dropping of Schrodinger seems only to suggest some kind of intelligent connection between his novel and the physicist’s theories without actually delivering on that suggestion.
The first mention of Schrodinger comes very early, right after Haverford’s crash, as he speaks with a policeman. “What do you do? Physics, I say. Like a teacher? No, more like research. Research, he laughs. Like test tubes? Like Schrodinger, I say. Quantum. Fancy, he says” (6). The cop’s remark is undoubtedly meant to speak for readers, as well. “Fancy,” we are supposed to think, that Carrera would mention a physicist like Schrodinger in his novel. Another instance comes a bit later, as Haverford reminisces about his time with Finny, a female character who is shrouded in the mystery of Haverford’s warped perspective but who seems to have been his girlfriend/wife. Haverford recounts, “Finny used to tell me I shouldn’t think too much. When you think too much, she’d say, it’s just like that puzzle with the cat you’re always talking about. That Schrodinger thing. You end up in two places at once... A person can’t exist in two places, she’d say. It splits them in two” (30). A very on-the-nose passage for a novel that shifts between opposing realities, which may be forgivable in a longer, more in-depth novel, but The Deer clocks in at only 144 pages, making short passages like this the extent of Carrera’s exploration of the idea.
Following his auto accident, Haverford is taken to Arthur’s home, where the two begin discussing their father’s funeral – the reality and date of which, as Haverford’s sanity spirals, is also put into question. In a scene recalling Kafka’s The Trial, Haverford is (falsely?) accused of murder, presumably the same accident where he killed the deer (if the deer actually existed at all). He is later sexually assaulted by one of the policemen, which parallels Side A’s other focus: the abuse Haverford suffered at the hands of his father, which continues to haunt him and is, as far as the narrative reveals, the reason for his mental instability. While the lingering effects of child abuse are yet another predictable cliché of the psychological thriller genre, Carrera worsens the offense by adding another predictable detail: Haverford’s father was a police officer. Most likely a figment of Haverford’s imagination rather than a true memory, the novel also introduces the idea that Arthur—until this point Haverford’s main tie to reality—joined in their father’s abuse. He thinks, “[Arthur]’d hold me down while my father ran his fingers along the inside of my – along the inside of my groin and wrapped his fingers around my cock,” an unsettling memory sparked by a separate memory of a sexual encounter with Finny in which her touch reminds him of his father’s (65). This description is perhaps the single moment in Side A that delivers on the novel’s horror/thriller atmosphere, but as with the rest of its prose, it still lacks a certain deftness to completely pull off its intentions. In other words, there is no substantial preparation or reason for this revelation, and it comes across as ham-fisted shock value.
Haverford’s narration soon loses all distinguishability between reality and memory, as his section ends with the Schrodinger-inspired back-and-forth of different responses to the same questions during a final police interrogation over whether or not he killed that deer after all. “Why did you speed up?” one policeman asks. “I sped up so that I could see the blood of the deer. I thought it would be beautiful,” he replies. Then, on the next line, his response changes to “I didn’t speed up” (78). As I said before, this sort of dissonance could be interesting if written well, but it provides nothing further to explore, no deeply buried gems to mine from the text. Unlike similar novels that force you to ask “Is this really happening?” like Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), or even Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), The Deer’s story isn’t interesting enough, or its prose strong enough, to make you care about solving the mystery, and upon a first-read it's questionable whether there is a mystery to solve at all.
Ultimately, the killing of the deer is inconsequential and serves mostly as a parallel to another narrative detail running throughout Haverford’s narration—the memory of his dog’s death, almost assuredly at the hands of his father, being blamed on him. Whether Haverford killed the deer with his car should be irrelevant to the police officers who are interrogating him, of course. But to Haverford, who is haunted by the accusation made against him in childhood, it means everything. Disbelief in his innocence of killing the dog is also disbelief in the reality of his father’s abuse. If his father was not responsible for killing the dog, he also wasn’t responsible for the sexual abuse, and this possibility fuels Haverford’s insanity. If Haverford killed the deer, then he also killed his dog, which therefore leaves his father innocent, at least in everyone’s eyes except his own.
Hidden Track, which presumably depicts Haverford’s father moments after slaughtering their dog, opens with two very questionable sentences which raise a further issue with the novel: “The man sits. He sits on a log” (83). Obviously a stylistic choice, the prose is full of unnecessarily choppy and redundant sentences like these, and despite the novel’s brevity they become tedious to read. Alternatively, in passages where Carrera wants to heighten the narration's incoherence, he writes in sparsely punctuated polysyndeton. While most authors marry subject to style, it's so obvious in The Deer that it borders on yet another cliché of debut novel writing: thinking that a chaotic switch in style shows brilliance. For example, take this passage from the end of Side A's Track 1:
"...when I got the glass out from the refrigerator the glass slipped into the sink and shattered and the white eyes of our dog blinked in the dark and as I reached down the door upstairs strained a long resounding creak that like the rushing of the sink over the knife I could live in, that I could spend eternity with and float with like an astronaut in a lake and never ever come to the crashing, deafening thud that now rains kitchen light dust on a knife doused in bubbles" (22).
Side B, arguably the more interesting of the two sections but also the most incoherent, is narrated by an unnamed woman who cares for her ailing Mother and her younger Sister. This section is undoubtedly indebted to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), from the unnamed characters to the post-apocalyptic ash floating throughout many scenes. The narrator, Sister, and Mother live in poverty brought about by a severe drought that has turned their location (left unspecified) into a survivalist wasteland. It’s the narrator’s literal and symbolic desire for water—for life, for growth—that drives this section. The narrator often remembers (or fantasizes?) about the pre-apocalyptic “Before Time” when water was still abundant. However, like most things in The Deer, it isn’t entirely clear whether the drought is real or just a figment of the narrator’s imagination. At one point, she joins Sister, who is experiencing the early days of her womanhood, in the shower to wash menstrual blood from her legs. Is it common to take a shower during a severe drought? Do water pipes still work during a post-apocalypse? Based on context, the scene takes place in the “real” present day, when water is so sparse that the narrator gets stuck in their well while trying to secure more of it, yet they are able to shower, cook, and wash dishes? Details like this aren’t explained, and since the novel doesn’t delve any deeper into them than surface-level narrative contradictions, they’re less intriguing than just frustrating.
As the narrator and Sister await Mother’s death (a doctor visits them regularly and insists that she doesn’t have much time left to live, leaving us to question why there are doctors in this wasteland at all), the narrator writes a novel (this novel?) on Polaroid pictures that have faded into blankness, cooks eggs for Sister, and reads stories from the “Old Book,” which seems to be both a book of fairy tales a la the Brothers Grimm and a science textbook from which they understand the world, apparently lacking any real education. Like McCarthy’s father and son in The Road, the narrator and Sister struggle to survive the drought as ash and smoke from distant forest fires encompass them. Like Side A, though, all of Side B’s narrative intrigue is lessened by its clunky prose. For example, after Mother’s death (which is questionable, as well, because she reappears only a few pages later, seemingly healthy and in the same linear timeline of the events when she finally passed away), the narrator and Sister begin trekking across the landscape towards the source of smoke they see on the horizon from their house at the edge of the woods. The narrator says, “We stop for lunch but have no food.” Then only sentences later: “I pour the dried kernels [of popcorn] into the pot… Sister and I pass a loaf back and forth. It dries our mouths, but we must eat” (127–128). So do they have food or not? As with details of the drought, the contradictions in The Deer don’t inspire rereading or contemplation; instead, they come across as simple mistakes of a first-time writer who hadn’t fully thought out what he was writing. The mystique of ambiguity is lost in the unfortunate fact that you don’t really care whether there is anything left to explore or not, and since the novel is billed as a psychological thriller it becomes apparent that Carrera wasn’t too worried about these details because any narrative shortcomings could be blamed on its “intentional” incoherence. Instead, it seems more like any sentences that sound cool, such as "We stop for lunch but have no food," were thrown in for atmospheric effect without any regard to whether they actually made sense within the context of the story.
Like Haverford, the narrator of Side B also spirals into complete mental instability, switching back and forth between her dual realities in nearly every paragraph. At one point, she suggests that Sister is only a figment of her imagination, saying, "How strange it has been to talk to you, knowing that you do not exist. That you are just a memory in a photograph, a faded image which I hold so dearly at the bottom of a well" (143). Of course, there are no other apparent indications of Sister's inexistence than this one, which left me to question why Carrera included it at all. Perhaps as a Fight Club or Shutter Island-esque twist? It reads like an unprompted detail meant only to make you reread the novel, but since a character only existing in the narrator's head is yet another trope of psychological thrillers, I kept that idea in mind from the beginning of Side B and saw nothing that would suggest a revelatory re-understanding of the novel if viewed from that perspective.
As Side B's narrator wraps up her section of the novel, a final example of Carrera's dependence on cliché overtakes the story. Mother, still dying in her bed, inexplicably hands the narrator a page from the Old Book. The page, quoted at length, explains the “psychology” behind the narrator's cognitive dissonance. The quote begins and ends:
“As in example (A), the subject in this passage experiences a succession of ‘echoes’—memories which have repeated themselves so often in the subject’s conscience they have now spilled out into sensory experience. Often these echoes arise as a defense mechanism, allowing the subject to take refuge from the turmoil of their present by immersing themselves in the past… This tendency to prefer the impression of the experience to the actual soon overtakes the subject’s mind such that they are drowning in impressions and abstractions, holding each new experience aloft as if some strange spectacle, alive but not alive, afraid but not afraid, dead but—” (141–142).
Not only is this explanation another undeserved reference to Schrodinger, it’s also another tiring cliché of the thriller genre (is anyone keeping count?), something that Hitchcock’s Psycho first perfected in 1960. At the risk of the reader/viewer not understanding what has already been made obvious, the story explains itself to us explicitly. Rather than “Norman Bates is insane and adopts his dead mother’s persona,” though, Carrera tells us that the narrator is so desperate to relive the better days of her life that she often believes she is still within them, ignoring the reality (?) of her current situation. Although I hate to use the word "pretentious," this final detail puts the nail in the coffin for Carrera's understanding and portrayal of psychology and physics in The Deer. Anyone can cite these things in their novel, and without providing some sort of reason for citing them, they only serve to make the story sound more intelligent than it really is, which although not uncommon for debut novelists, is neither fair to, nor fun for, the reader.
The Deer is out from Dalkey Archive Press. Despite my grievances with the novel, I wish to thank Dalkey for being kind enough to send me an advanced review copy of the book.
March 15, 2023
Strange, chewy and yet still difficult to grasp at all. I have read this twice and feel called to read it many times again; the experimental film comparison is apt, and this feels like more of a story to think with than a story to master. The orientation toward quantum ambiguity challenges the idea of complete(d) understanding at all, and while frustrated, I also respect it.
May 27, 2024
A very experimental book that reads somewhat more of an art piece than a novel. One of the most impactful pieces to this story, in my opinion, is the act of the character we follow (a quantum physicist) using the quantum superstition theory and applying it to his trauma. Definitely a lot to digest here, but absolutely worth a read if dark and surreal heavy books! Also an amazing use of the analogy of “maybe” hitting the deer, and the obsession with the fawn related back to the fact that in a sense, he is ALSO a fawn!
November 4, 2025
If you hit this deer, keep driving.
December 6, 2023
Frankly, this book reads like a bad trip. In the beginning, I was very on board with the jumbled, disjointed storytelling. I assumed it was to represent the protagonist's state of mind -- which I still think it was -- in order to prepare the reader for the suspense of the actual plot. Unfortunately, it turned out that there is no plot. The jumbled mess that is the book's mentally unstable protagonist is all the reader gets. And then there is a second part that is even worse. Apart from one or two small similarities/references, it does not seem to have anything to do with the first part. Now, considering how bad the first part was, this might seem like a good thing at first. Alas, it isn't. Once again, there is neither a proper plot or any other interesting aspects to work with. Ultimately, I would be surprised if anyone understood this book -- including the author.
December 30, 2022
I can’t think of another novel I’d describe as ambient. This one feels like stumbling through an uncertain reality and growing antlers. A world coated in fog where animal and man blend, where the road curves and the forest takes over, and every sensation is both cerebral and completely out of body.
August 27, 2022
i can’t tell whether this was brilliant or stupid but either way, i didn’t get it. to be honest i don’t think the author did either…
October 14, 2022
Formally bold and exhilarating, sensory and rhythmic! I cannot wait to see what Carrera does next
May 14, 2023
It’s a bit of a mess that doesn’t benefit from any of its experimentation, but it’s ambition is enough to make me appreciate it and its publication
August 7, 2023
a kind of agonizing novella / prose poem that starts with the hitting of a deer in a car during a drunk driving incident (or does it? maybe it doesn't) and continues through an abstract investigation on the connective tissue and traumatic relationships between family in a way that is I'll just go ahead and say it very hard to follow indeed. I did however read this entire book while waiting in an ER waiting room so my experiences may have been rearranged by buzzing fluorescent lights and people crying about how they're in pain and then also it was a little too cold in there. I also read a Stefan Zweig short story that kept me at arms distance. So personal reading experience considered here: YMMV.
August 22, 2022
A book length, hallucinogenic, feverish nightmare. Bizarrely gripping surrealism like Lynch's Lost Highway or Eraserhead. Wasn't sure what to make of it until I read this review from Chicago Review of Books but I think I'm in love.
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2022/08/...
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2022/08/...
February 25, 2023
I'm a huge fan of David lynch and surrealist prose with a touch of dread, so this was right up my street.
Poetic, dreamlike, haunting imagery that feels like falling in and out of a nightmare after a car crash.
Recommend for anyone who enjoys eerie, unsettling ambient atmospheres
Poetic, dreamlike, haunting imagery that feels like falling in and out of a nightmare after a car crash.
Recommend for anyone who enjoys eerie, unsettling ambient atmospheres
July 15, 2023
I read this a couple weeks ago but have been holding off on a review because I actual got asked to write an official one for The Collidescope. Check that out here: https://thecollidescope.com/2023/07/1...
Suffice it to say, a pretty excellent debut novel.
Suffice it to say, a pretty excellent debut novel.
December 27, 2024
I could probably reread this book numerous times and pick out hidden meanings each time. It's trippy, in the most artistic way. I enjoyed trying to pick it apart the best I could with what brain capacity I had each time I picked it up.
November 27, 2023
It’s the old he said, deer said story.
October 3, 2024
Appears be two novellas linked by one concept (a deer).
The premise of each novella is solid (the first seems like a realist indie movie, the second like a semi-fabulist, maybe post-apocalytic tale) and the structure (gestures toward the A-side/B-side and tracks of a vinyl record) is novel.
But it's somewhat muddled and gestured at, and buried under repetitive and clumsy prose, which killed it for me.
Interested to see what Carrera will do in a next book, but this one is so-so.
The premise of each novella is solid (the first seems like a realist indie movie, the second like a semi-fabulist, maybe post-apocalytic tale) and the structure (gestures toward the A-side/B-side and tracks of a vinyl record) is novel.
But it's somewhat muddled and gestured at, and buried under repetitive and clumsy prose, which killed it for me.
Interested to see what Carrera will do in a next book, but this one is so-so.
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