Slab
Selah Saterstrom
On a slab that’s all Katrina left of her Mississippi home, Tiger tells her story, and it is as American as Horatio Alger, Schwab’s Pharmacy, and a tent revival. She was a stripper, but is she now a performance artist and best-selling author, and it is really Barbara Walters she’s narrating this tale to?
Slab is how a girl ends up in the backwash of decadence and sin, and how out of the flotsam and jetsam she might construct a story of herself and the South to carry her to salvation.
Serial killers, preachers, and prison flower-arranging classes. Bikers, bad boyfriends, and a stripper who performed as a Trans Am. Tiger has seen it all, and as she sits on her slab, identifying anecdotes as they go by, we witness Selah Saterstrom at her greatest—funny, bawdy, and steeped in the landscape and all the devastation it has created and absorbed.
PRAISE FOR SELAH SATERSTROM
“The Meat and Spirit Plan is ferocious and dazzling, the work of a savage poet. Every scene is a hard polished gem of raunch and revelation. Strung together they build a force of piercing tenderness. It’s an impressive achievement, and a real pleasure to read.”
—Katherine Dunn
“Saterstrom writes with a poet’s economy and eye for visceral detail, collapsing into a mere 140 pages a four-generation history of a Southern family bedeviled by alcoholism, poverty, racism, violence, and mental illness. Her spareness is a mercy. The story she tells is brutal, almost impossible to take; at the same time, her exquisite, cut-to-the-quick language makes this book impossible to put down.”
—The Huffington Post, included in “11 Underappreciated Literary Masterpieces”
“Brutal but also deeply lyrical, Saterstrom’s beautiful novel paints a portrait of a family wracked by its own dysfunction and held fast by a place that has never fully recovered since the day the Civil War began—the day known, as the book tellingly reminds us, as ‘Ruination Day.’”
—Publishers Weekly
“Stories that are good must be told and this one tells its way right into your subconscious and stays there until you fall asleep, haunting you with words and images.”
—Bookslut
