Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

Moshfegh’s writing style is incredibly unique and completely captivating.

I read My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Moshfegh and couldn’t figure out what I thought of the story, but I did know I loved her writing style. But the story - more a stream of consciousness over a few days - laid out in Death in Her Hands captivated me much more, thus also making Moshfegh’s incredible writing even more engaging - I powered through this book.

It’s not often a protagonist is a widowed 72-year-old woman (Vesta), and when it is, you don’t expect to genuinely get a little bit scared and anxious at points while reading.

The book starts with a murder confession, well, there’s only a note and no body. The following narrative is full of twists and turns, peppered with small details about Vesta'’s past. The book’s characters occupied my head even when I wasn’t reading it, and I tried to piece together the clues I’d been presented with, both to try and solve the mystery of the non-existent body and to try and gain an understanding of Vesta’s past.

It is easy, I thought, to find great affection for victims, emblems of vanish potential. This is nothing more heartbreaking than a squandered opportunity, a missed chance. I knew about stuff like that. I’d been young once. So many dreams had been dashed. But I dashed them myself. I wanted to be safe, whole, have a future of certainty. One makes mistakes when there is confusion between having a future at all and having the future one wants.

There are times when the book feels repetitive, at times the slow build seems a little too slow, plus the ending was abrupt and - to some - unsatisfactory. But despite this, I would read it again for the powerful was Moshfegh writes.

Time has wrinkled my skin enough so that the sharp edges of my skull - which used to be so fascinating - have softened, like a blanket thrown over a carved mahogany chair.

Blurb: Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.

While on her daily walk with her dog in the nearby woods, our protagonist comes across this note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground with stones. Shaky even on her best days, she is also recently widowed, new to this area, alone, and now deeply alarmed; the note grows quickly into a full-blown obsession.

As her theories about Magda - who she was, what happened to her, and where her body has disappeared to - multiply, the lines between nightmare, fantasy and reality start to fog. Can there be an innocent explanation for all this, or a much more sinister one - one that strikes closer to home?