Decomposition Book

Van Os’s equally eerie and tender first novel is a smart and off-kilter exploration of survival and queer intimacy. Through journal entries, a young woman named Ava describes how her hiking trip with office mates Chad and Megan goes slowly, catastrophically wrong. Several months later, Savannah, who has a long history of psychiatric hospitalizations, the last of which was prompted by a traumatic rift with her friend Michelle, awakens from a blackout next to Ava’s dead body and journal in the woods. Savannah begins to fantasize about Ava as she was when she was alive, reconstructing her personality through her journal, social media posts, and finally as a strangely corporeal ghost. Savannah is positioned as a classically unreliable narrator, whose version of events is interspersed with increasingly desperate entries from Ava’s notebook. Van Os skillfully captures the rising panic of getting lost in the woods, calling to mind survival horror like The Blair Witch Project and Yellowjackets, while her gloopy, visceral descriptions of decay are reminiscent of the kind of bodily unease relished by Ottesha Moshfegh. In spite of their grim circumstances, the characters are endearing, their queer relationships characterized by overwhelming compassion and leavened by a gentle dark humor. This is sure to win van Os many fans. (May)