Animals Eat Each Other is Elle Nash’s debut novel, a story of a sadomasochistic throuple published by Dzanc Books in the United States in 2018 and by 404 Ink in the United Kingdom in 2019. The action sits in early 2005. An unnamed narrator — later nicknamed Lilith — slides into a violent sexual arrangement with Frankie and Matt, a couple her own age who have just become parents. Nash’s 2022 novel Gag Reflex is a prequel. For readers who want SM fiction that does not tidy itself into a dungeon-etiquette manual, this is the book: trailer-park work, Radio Shack fluorescent light, and sex that is watched as much as it is done.
After high school the narrator lives in a trailer with her mother and takes a job at a Radio Shack. A co-worker introduces her to Frankie and Matt. Frankie gives her the nickname Lilith, after Adam’s first wife. That is the name the book then uses. Lilith starts sleeping with the couple. Most of the sex is violent and happens with Matt while Frankie watches. After a few months she develops a crush on Matt. The two of them start seeing each other in private, which already breaches the arrangement that brought her in. While still involved with Matt and Frankie, she is also sleeping with other people, including her boss and her co-worker, and flirts with Matt’s friend Patrick.
When Patrick’s girlfriend finds out, she tells Frankie, and Frankie orders Matt to break it off with Lilith. After the split Lilith mourns the relationship with Matt and has sex with Jenny. Three months later Matt contacts her again: Frankie has been arrested for domestic violence. Lilith has sex with him for the first time without Frankie in the room. The condom breaks. She feels a coldness between them, takes the morning-after pill, and then gets calls from both Frankie and Matt. They use derogatory names and end the relationship for good.
Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review and named Nash a writer to watch in spring 2018. O, The Oprah Magazine put it on a top-ten list of 2018 summer reads. Gag Reflex sends readers back before the Radio Shack job and the throuple. The debut itself stays locked on that early-2005 stretch: a girl from a trailer, two new parents, and a sadomasochistic triangle that eats itself.
