Delicate Creatures opens in 2005 in the small West Virginia town of Blue Hollow, where reporter Britt Mackenzie receives an alarming call from her mother, Linda, the local school principal. Twelve-year-old Sammy King has missed two days of school, and his mother, Desiree “Des” King, is not answering anyone. Britt is Des’s closest friend, so she goes to the King house to investigate. The doors are locked, but Britt knows where the spare key is. Inside she discovers a horrifying kitchen covered in blood: blood on the floor, walls and counter, broken dishes, and a wide smear leading toward the back door, suggesting that a body has been dragged away. Yet there is no body. Des, Sammy, and Des’s husband Gary King, Blue Hollow’s respected mayor, have all vanished. Sheriff Martin Hutchins and deputy Julian Holt arrive and begin investigating, while Britt immediately feels that something about the situation connects to Des’s past. The novel then moves repeatedly backward and forward in time, gradually explaining how this apparently perfect family was created and what was really happening behind its respectable surface.
The older story begins in 1985, when twelve-year-old Des Hudson lives with her widowed father, Cotton, on Blue Mountain. Des’s mother Jeannette died two years earlier, leaving both Des and Cotton submerged in grief. Cotton is enormous, gentle and physically powerful, a former traveling boxer who once fought under the name Hurricane. Their isolated life changes when Mari Nakamura and her thirteen-year-old son Ozias move into a nearby cabin. Mari, who is Black and Japanese, inherited the cabin from Beau, Ozias’s dead father, a Vietnam veteran with whom she had a brief relationship as a teenager. Mari hopes Blue Hollow will give both her and Ozias a new beginning. Des immediately becomes fascinated by Ozias. Barefoot, accompanied by her pig Wilbur, she walks into his yard while he is unsuccessfully trying to chop wood, gives him raspberries and teaches him how to use the axe properly. They discover a shared love of mythology and books, and their friendship becomes intensely close. Des shows Ozias the mountain, the streams and a rocky place she calls the Lookout; he, in turn, gives her the companionship she has desperately lacked since her mother’s death. Mari also becomes an important maternal figure to Des, helping her when she begins menstruating and answering questions that Des cannot bring herself to ask Cotton. Cotton realizes that grief has caused him to neglect his daughter and resolves to become more present. Among other things, he teaches Des how to fight and defend herself if a man ever touches her violently.
Ozias’s arrival also exposes the racism buried in Blue Hollow. At school, Martin Hutchins, the sheriff’s son, humiliates Ozias with racist slurs. Des intervenes, and when Martin taunts her by saying that Cotton was responsible for Jeannette’s death, Des violently attacks him. Even the school principal responds to Ozias and Mari with open prejudice. Des nevertheless refuses to let anyone separate her from Ozias. As the years pass, friendship becomes love. Des imagines an entire future for them on Blue Mountain: a house, gardens, animals and several children. Ozias loves this vision too, but worries that he cannot afford it. In 1990, after poor SAT results and uncertainty about college, he meets an Army recruiter who promises discipline, belonging and a route toward a better future. Ozias enlists without first discussing it with Des. When he invites her to the Lookout to tell her, Des mistakenly believes he is going to propose marriage. She is devastated when she realizes he is leaving instead. Shortly after Ozias begins basic training, Iraq invades Kuwait. Then Cotton suffers a catastrophic workplace accident and is crushed between machinery and a wall, leaving him permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Mari learns almost simultaneously that Ozias is going to be deployed. Believing he needs to remain mentally focused if he is to survive combat, she conceals Cotton’s accident from him and persuades Des to do the same. Des even misses Ozias’s graduation because Cotton has just awakened and learned he will never walk again. Ozias interprets her absence through Mari’s lies and goes to war without understanding what has happened at home.
