So, what's with the synchronicities between this and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead? Both feature a reclusive old woman living in the woods; give prime significance to a dog; riff on the murder mystery genre; use Blake (albeit in different ways); and tackle the oppressions of living under a patriarchy. The more overt engagement with the Catholic church in Drive manifests as teasing hints in Death: Magda, Ghod, Vesta (vestments?), the town where she lives, Bethsmane, a kind of linguistic mash-up of Bethlehem and Gethsemane... One big difference, though, is that while I didn't get on *at all* with Drive Your Plow, I *loved* this!

Moshfegh continues to awe with her originality, her cool and controlled writing, her sheer interestingness (and if that's not a word, it ought to be!). Here, she's attentive to reading, having Vesta parse a brief note to infinity and offering up a model of how to read from all angles. She also delivers a sly masterclass in how to create characters as we watch Vesta - a rich character in her own right - 'create' Magda from nothing.

At the same time, Vesta's own life and personality seep out from behind the smokescreen of plot. In another story, Vesta could have been just one of those women who represent a generation who must have been born in the 1950s: in Moshfegh's hands, she's also an individual, unique, whose voice may have been muted all her life but who steps alive, now, off the page... even as the text itself reminds us that she's a creature of the writer's imagination. Did I say this is seductively meta?

This is less obviously grimy than Eileen, with more ostensible plot than My Year of Rest and Relaxation. There are flashes of Moshfegh's subversive humour (on the now empty urn that held her husband's ashes: 'What would I fill it back up with? Dirt from the garden? Plant a tulip bulb?') and the sheer intelligence, both literary and emotional, shines through. Marvellous, undoubtedly set to be one of my reads of the year - and my book-crush on Moshfegh continues!

I’ll start with the things I absolutely hated about this novel:
1. The ending. I won’t spoil it but it is horrifying.
2. The fatphobia. I initially tried to convince myself that it was just the character, and that Moshfegh was using it to give the protagonist Vesta some flaws but no. The vitriol and frequency, for no real reason of plot, must surely mean that Ottessa Moshfegh hates fat people.
But somehow I still liked Death in Her Hands. Moshfegh just draws you in so you have to keep reading. This murder mystery, of sorts, dedicates quite a lot of time to ruminating on the process of writing, and even begins to have Vesta write her own story, and I would have loved if the whole novel continued in that vein. Vesta is also just the perfect unreliable narrator: an elderly woman living alone in the middle of nowhere with a very active imagination.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for a copy of this novel.

Ottessa Moshfegh novels all seems quite different to each other and this is no exception. While I enjoy Moshfegh’s writing style and flew through this book, overall I neither hated it or loved it.

The novel consists of a rambling stream of consciousness of the unreliable protagonist and her wild imagination.
I have to admit that I was sort of waiting for this to stop and something more concrete to emerge which it didn’t quite.