Death in Her Hands

Experience should have taught me that first impressions are often misleading. Kneeling down in the dirt, I considered the details: the paper was a page from a lined, spiral notebook, its perforated edge broken cleanly, no straggly bits from where it had been torn out; careful, small printed letters in blue ballpoint pen. It was hard to decipher much from the penmanship, and that seemed deliberate. It was the kind of neat, impersonal printing you'd use when making a sign for a yard sale, or filling out a form at the dentist. 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. But the words themselves, when I spoke them aloud, seemed witty, a rare quality in Levant, where most people were blue collar and dull. I read the note again and almost chuckled over that penultimate line, It wasn't me. Of course it wasn't.

If not a prank, the note could have been the beginning of a story tossed out as a false start, a bad opening. I could understand the hesitation. It's a rather dark, damning way to begin a story: the pronouncement of a mystery whose investigation is futile. Nobody will ever know who killed her. The story is over just as it's begun. Was futility a subject worthy of exploration? The note certainly didn't promise any happy ending.

Here is her dead body. Surely there was more to say. Where was Magda? Was it so hard to come up with a description of her corpse, tangled in the brush under a fallen tree, her face half sunken into the soft black dirt, her hands hog-tied behind her back, the blood from her stab wounds leaching into the ground? How hard was it to imagine a small golden locket glinting between sodden birch leaves, the chain broken and dashed through the new, tender, hairy grass? The locket could contain photos of a young, gap-toothed child on one side-Magda at age five-and a m

Just how insidious is it to be loved poorly? And what does madness look like when so much of the world seems insane? . . . Moshfegh has a talent for first-person narratives that feel fresh, strange, unreliable and amusing. The Wall Street Journal

Ottessa Moshfegh, the authorial doyenne of hermits and eccentrics, misanthropes and recluses, is back with another novel narrated by an alienated and alienating woman whose uncanny, idiosyncratic voice compels us to read. Death in Her Hands is at once a satire of and metafictional commentary on the mystery/crime genre, a study of trauma s effect on the psyche, and a reflection on the creative process. . . . [A] striking and original contribution to Moshfegh s remarkable oeuvre. The Boston Globe

Literature s reigning queen of the profane, Ottessa Moshfegh, is divisive: Readers tend to love her or hate her. If her latest novel is subtler than her most recent works, it s just as chilling it could be a jumping-off point for new readers. A self-contained horror story that takes place inside the mind of an alluringly unreliable narrator, the novel follows a 72-year-old widow who has moved with her dog to a large plot of land where they are seemingly at one with nature. When she finds a handwritten note that implies a murder has taken place on her property, she works to solve it as best she can. The narrator s dark fantasies and less-than-pure thoughts work especially well if you think of Death in Her Hands as a sequel to Moshfegh s deliciously gross and grotesque debut novel, Eileen. Vulture

A masterclass in suspense. The Economist

No contemporary writer is as adept at malignant narrators as Ottessa Moshfegh, whose characters are worthy of Poe or Dostoevsky. Moshfegh s latest, Death in Her Hands, is a worthy addition to her oeuvre. . . . Death in Her Hands is not quite a murder mystery and not quite gothic, but something far darker. The Millions

A searching portrait of grief, loneliness and the comforts of storytelling. Huffington Post

Moshfegh is among the most talented writers working. I can think of no one who writes with greater insight about isolation and the often-macabre manner in which it warps the psyche. Washington Independent Review of Books

Dark doesn t even begin to describe Ottessa Moshfegh s latest novel, Death in Her Hands. Try horrifying, macabre, fashionably self-referential and exceptionally well-written a book, as the publisher s blurb says, that asks us to consider how the stories we tell ourselves both reflect the truth and keep us blind to it. Plus, it s got a great dog. Associated Press
 
Death in Her Hands is not so much about solving a death as it is about conjuring a life. In its apparent plotlessness, it posits philosophical questions about the meaning of mortality. . . . Death in Her Hands is a book that casts loneliness and freedom in unexpected lights. The Washington Post

Moshfegh, known for her screwball subversions of genre tropes and her gleefully grotesque sensibility, here offers a thriller that glitters with jagged details and unfolds mostly inside the protagonist s head. The New Yorker (Briefly Noted)

Part crime thriller, part dark comedy, and totally delightful. Good Housekeeping

This unnerving latest from Moshfegh offers a truly creepy murder mystery while commenting on our relationship to the genre itself. Library Journal

Perhaps the most jarring genre of fiction is the kind that takes you deep into the gradual unraveling of a person's mind. Moshfegh does a masterful job with Death In Her Hands, which follows a protagonist who believes she's solving a murder. The book moves seamlessly from suspenseful to horrifying, retaining the reader's attention all the while. Marie Claire

Cleverly unraveling, linguistically brilliant, and limning the limits of reality, [Death in Her Hands] will speak to fans of literary psychological suspense. Booklist

From her bracing debut novel, Eileen, to her breakout 2018 hit, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Moshfegh has perfected an enervating, claustrophobic style in which complex anti-heroines seek escape through fantasy or delusion. Her latest novel, Death in Her Hands, continues in this vein, depositing a recognizable, Moshfegh-ian protagonist into a twisting, satirical murder mystery. WBUR Radio
 
A much subtler, more mature book one in which suffering is developed rather than declared. Bookforum

As strange and haunting as anything of its kind I have ever read, an unclassifiable masterpiece in that twilit border country of literature between crime and magical realism. The Week

Unlike anything else you ll read all year. It s Moshfegh at her darkest and sharpest. HelloGiggles, Most Anticipated Books of 2020

When it comes to evoking the jagged edge of contemporary anxiety, there might not be a more insightful writer working today than Moshfegh. That is, if the boundless dark potential of the human psyche is your thing. If it s not, this atmospheric, darkly comic tale of a pathologically lonely widow and the thrills lurking in her sylvan retreat might not be for you. But, sophisticated reader that you are, you re not afraid of the dark. Right? The Millions