Book Review: Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

This is probably my favorite of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novels– at least out of the ones I’ve read thus far.

About the Book

Title: Death in Her Hands

Author: Ottessa Moshfegh

Published: 2020

Genre: fiction, suspense

My Rating: 5/5 stars

My Thoughts

With every one of her novels I read, I grow to appreciate Ottessa Moshfegh as a writer even more. There is something about the way she writes– the lush descriptions, captivating inner monologues and the strange, flawed, yet oddly sympathetic protagonists. This book was actually probably my favorite of her novels so far.

Death in Her Hands is narrated by an elderly woman named Vesta who lives alone with her dog in a cabin, after the death of her husband. One day on her morning walk with her dog, she finds a note on the ground with the cryptic message, “Her name was Magda. No one will ever know who killed her. Here is her dead body.” There is no body, but immediately Vesta begins to imagine who could have written this note, why they would have left it here, and who Magda is.

The book heavily focuses on Vesta’s internal monologue, but I think that pacing choice nevertheless works well for this story because it was a study of Vesta’s crumbling mental health and paranoid imaginations. The edges of reality begin to blend into her paranoia.

One unexpected thing I noticed while reading this was that some of Vesta’s thought patterns, and the way she gradually got more and more unsettled and her imagination seemed more and more indistinguishable from reality, reminded me of what I sometimes feel like when I have a strong OCD obsession. It feels so real. Your brain is so convincing sometimes, so I suppose that’s what resonated with me the most in this book– how out of control your thoughts can get, and how you can become consumed by horrors you thought of yourself but that seem so impossibly real.

Vesta’s fears around death also stuck with me– I also often think about how much people seem to be in deniable about death and how horrifying our existence on Earth really is.

“How did people go on with their lives as though death weren’t all around them?”

Have you read Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh? What did you think of it? Feel free to let me know in the comments!

If you liked this post, consider subscribing to Frappes & Fiction. I post about the books I read (even if they’re not fiction), the books I think YOU should read, and anything else on my mind.