Ottessa Moshfegh

From one of our most ceaselessly provocative literary talents, a novel of haunting metaphysical suspense about an elderly widow whose life is upturned when she finds a cryptic note on a walk in the woods that ultimately makes her question everything about her new home. While on her normal daily walk with her dog in the nearby forest woods, our protagonist comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground with a frame of stones. "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." Our narrator is deeply shaken; she has no idea what to make of this. She is new to this area, having moved here from her longtime home after the death of her husband, and she knows very few people. And she's a little shaky even on her best days. Her brooding about this note quickly grows into a full-blown obsession, and she begins to devote herself to exploring the possibilities of her conjectures about who this woman was and how she met her fate. Her suppositions begin to find echoes in the real world, and with mounting excitement and dread, the fog of mystery starts to form into a concrete and menacing shape. But as we follow her in her investigation, strange dissonances start to accrue, and our faith in her grip on reality weakens, until finally, just as she is seemingly facing some of the darkness in her own past with her late husband, we are forced to face the prospect that there is either a more innocent explanation for all this or a much more sinister one -- one that strikes much closer to home. A triumphant blend of horror, suspense and pitch-black comedy, Death in Her Hands asks us to consider how the stories we tell ourselves both guide us closer to the truth and keep us at bay from it. Once again, we are in the hands of a narrator whose unreliability is well-earned, only this time the stakes have never been higher.

Death in Her Hands

Mitch

An ax murderer wouldn’t be very quick on his feet, carrying an ax and all.

“That morning with the meadowlark was, perhaps, a significant day for Charlie. He discovered his innate purpose, some instinct kicked in. But what could I possibly want with that dead bird? I hadn’t shot it down, nobody had. It was an odd thing to feel impelled to retrieve. Such are instincts. They aren’t always reasonable, and often they lead us down dangerous paths.”

“Naive, actually, to think that a mere signature was so binding. It’s just a little ink on paper, just a scribble, my name. They couldn’t come after me, drag me back to Monlith, simply because I’d moved a pen around.”

“That was how life seemed to be—finding things to do to pass the time. The less I’d looked at the clock, the better I knew I’d enjoyed my day.”

“Reading was different, of course. I liked books. Books were quiet. They wouldn’t scream in my face or get offended if I gave up on them. If I didn’t like what I read, I could throw the book across the room. I could burn it in my fireplace. I could rip out the pages and use them to blow my nose, or in the bathroom. I never did any of that, of course—most of the books I read came from the library. When I didn’t like something, I just shut the book and put it on the table by the door, spine facing the wall so that I wouldn’t have to look at it again. There was great satisfaction in shoving a bad book through the return slot and hearing it splat against the other books in the bin on the other side of the librarian’s desk. “You can just hand that to me,” the librarian said. Oh no, I liked to shove it through. It made me feel powerful.

“Oh, forgive me, I didn’t see you there,” I’d whisper.”

“But people lied all the time. It was part of what kept us whole as individuals. A little lying never hurt anybody. It kept the bounds of what one person was distinct from what another person was.”

“Is that what life was like? As much as I complained of Walter leaving me alone at night in Monlith, or traveling too much, there was always money. There was always heat, and nice carpets and fluffy towels, food in the fridge, a newspaper on the front step every morning, and I was embraced from time to time. In the winter I had an entire closet full of warm things to wear.”

Ziggy

You spend so much time playing in your mind, like a sandbox. Everything just slipping through your fingers, nothing solid to hold.

Grace McCarter

Wise, I thought. Smart. Whoever had written the note understood that by masking one's peculiarities, one invokes authority. There is nothing as imposing as anonymity.

There was great satisfaction in shoving a bad book through the return slot and hearing it splat against the other books in the bin on the other side of the librarian's desk. “You can just hand that to me," the librarian said. Oh no, I liked to shove it through. It made me feel powerful. 

“Oh, forgive me, I didn't see you there," I'd whisper.

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