By Dashiel Carrera
ISBN: 9781628974027
Publication Date: 9/13/2022
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.
Reviews
"The Deer is luminous, sacred, mysterious—beautifully conceived, a first work of mesmerizing poignancy and power." —Carole Maso, author of The Art Lover
“Haunting, magnetic, compulsively beautiful, The Deer shines a dark light into uncertain corridors of mind and memory, into the churn of narrative itself. This book leaves an indelible impression, and with it Carrera makes a stunning debut.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
"In compelling, imagistic prose, The Deer builds up a world, takes it apart, then builds it up with different shapes in different skins. Carrera offers alternate but equally disturbing realities while having the courage not to declare one of them 'real'." —Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World
"Haunted, haunting, Dashiel Carrera’s The Deer splits its central story into spliced reels, images moving characters back in time through memory and magical realism. At the core of this brilliant experimental novel is the question of sentience. What do humans and animals feel; how does blood bind us; what does it mean to remember the past if the past changes with the future. Structurally innovative and emotionally intense, The Deer inhabits a strange and magical literary landscape." —Carol Guess, author of Girl Zoo and Sleep Tight Satellite
"Disorienting but heartfelt, fragmentary but immersive, Dashiel Carrera’s The Deer deftly melds the disorienting effects of existential crisis alongside the fever dreamscape of family memory into something like a new As I Lay Dying for the post-Disintegration Loops era." —Blake Butler, author of Molly
“Things collide and breath stops—but whose?—and the hinge squeaks open onto Dashiel Carrera’s The Deer. Narrative and language are destabilized and wonderful, full of awe, woozy: let us inebriate and witness.” —Lily Hoang, author of Underneath and A Bestiary
“It begins with a man who may or may not have hit a deer with his car. As the story unfolds, the lean prose of this haunting novel blurs echoes of a past with an ambiguous present to create a reality in the way that an arroyo remembers the rush of water that carved it. Atmospheric in the manner of Kafka, The Deer is a brilliant articulation of the unseen, of the depths that shape one ordinary life.” —Steve Tomasula, author of Ascension: A Novel
Biographical Information
Dashiel Carrera is a writer, musician, and media artist from Newton, Massachusetts. He received his BA from Brown University in Literary Arts and is currently a PhD student in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Toronto. The Deer is his first novel.