Death in Her Hands
Ottessa Moshfegh, 2020
Penguin Publishing
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781984879356
Summary
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 an ominous note on a walk in the woods.
While on her daily walk with her dog in a secluded woods, a woman comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground by stones.
"Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body."
But there is no dead body. Our narrator is deeply shaken; she has no idea what to make of this. She is new to this area, alone after the death of her husband, and she knows no one.
Becoming obsessed with solving this mystery, our narrator imagines who Magda was and how she met her fate. With very little to go on, she invents a list of murder suspects and possible motives for the crime. Oddly, her suppositions begin to find correspondences in the real world, and with mounting excitement and dread, the fog of mystery starts to fade into menacing certainty.
As her investigation widens, strange dissonances accrue, perhaps associated with the darkness in her own past; we must face the prospect that there is either an innocent explanation for all this or a much more sinister one.
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 reflect the truth and keep us blind to it. Once again, we are in the hands of a narrator whose unreliability is well earned, and the stakes have never been higher. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 20, 1981
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College; M.F.A., Brown University
• Awards—Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award (more below)
• Currently—lives in New England
Ottessa Moshfegh is an American author and novelist who was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Croatian mother and Jewish-Iranian father. Both parents were musicians, who taught at the New England Conservatory of Music. Moshfegh herself learned to play piano and clarinet as a child.
Education and Career
Moshfegh received her B.A. from Barnard College in 2002. After graduation, she moved to China where she taught English and worked in a punk bar. In her mid-twenties, she moved to New York City where she worked for Overlook Press and then as an assistant to the author Jean Stein. After contracting cat-scratch fever, she left the city and earned an M.F.A. from Brown University.
Ottessa's first work of fiction was the novella "McGlue," published in 2014. Her debut novel Eileen was released in 2015 and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. The novel was also shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and selected as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
n 2017 Moshfega published a collection of stories, Homesick for Another World. Her second novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, was published in 2018, and Death in Her Hands, her third, came out in 2020.
Moshfegh is a frequent contributor to the Paris Review; she has published numerous stories in the journal since 2012.
Awards and honors
2013–15 Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University
2013 Plimpton Prize for Fiction (Paris Review) - "Bettering Myself" (story)
2014 Fence Modern Prize in Prose - "McGlue"
2014 Believer Book Award winner - "McGlue"
2016 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award - Eileen
2016 Man Booker Prize (shortlist) - Eileen
2018 The Story Prize finalist for Homesick for Another World
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/29/2018.)
Book Reviews
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
It all starts with a note that reads, "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." An elderly widow finds it in the woods and her horror and curiosity soon turns into an obsession. But just as her investigation begins to take shape, we begin to doubt our narrator's grip on reality. This is part crime thriller, part dark comedy, and totally delightful.
Good Housekeeping
[C]hilling…. A self-contained horror story that takes place inside the mind of an alluringly unreliable narrator…. When shhe 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
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
Moshfegh is a novelist I will follow pretty much anywhere, even if this story’s winding path raised as many questions as it answered.
Vogue.com
There’s an intriguing idea at the center of this about how the mind can spin stories in order to stay alive, but the novel lacks the devious, provocative fun of Moshfegh’s other work, and is messy enough to make readers wonder what exactly to make of it.
Publishers Weekly
This unnerving latest from Moshfegh offers a truly creepy murder mystery while commenting on our relationship to the genre itself.
Library Journal
A fractured, startlingly human narrator in Moshfegh’s… inimitable style, Vesta quickly reveals a relentless imagination matched only by her desire to uncover the truth…. Cleverly unraveling… the limits of reality… this will speak to fans of literary psychological suspense.
Booklist
You simultaneously worry about Vesta and root for her, and Moshfegh’s handling of her story is at once troubling and moving. An eerie and affecting satire of the detective novel.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for DEATH IN HER HANDS … then take off on your own:
1. When Vesta Gul finds the note about a murder that kicks this narrative off, why doesn't she call the police? What would you have done?
2. How does Vesta come up with "Blake," the supposed identity of the supposed murderer? Does she use random association, research, logic, imagination? Is the author poking fun at mystery novels?
3. What do we come to learn about Vesta as she begins to determine the plot and characters of her "murder mystery"? Is she writing a mystery… or living within one?
4. Talk about Vesta's marriage to her late husband, Walter Gul. What kind of man was Walter?
5. Vest recalls how Walter playing chess with himself--that by switching chairs, as he told her, "the psyche confronts itself.” He goes on: "The mind must be spoken to, Vesta, otherwise it starts to atrophy.” Vesta doesn't buy it: "But if the mind talks to itself… isn’t it just saying what it wants to hear?” Is Vesta suggesting that our attempts to understand our own lives and selves are simply efforts in delusion or illusion? Does this rule apply to Vesta herself?
6. At what point do you come to think that Ottessa Moshfegh is writing a novel within a novel. Or is she? How do you untangle this?
7. Is any of this real? Has Vesta dreamed all of this? Has she even fabricated Walter? What about her dog Charlie? Does he exist?
8. Is this book a mindfuck?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)