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Death in Her Hands

Review

Death in Her Hands

After the death of her husband, Walter, 72-year-old Vesta Gul leaves her small town behind and moves, with her beloved dog Charlie, cross country to another small town. Vesta soon settles into a quiet, cozy and predictable life in her new home, a former scout camp on a lake. However, out on a walk one morning, she finds a handwritten note weighed down by black rocks on a wooded path. It reads, “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” This sends Vesta down a curious mental path as she tries to solve the mystery of Magda’s murder in Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest novel, DEATH IN HER HANDS. 
 
Vesta’s investigation into Magda’s death is not based on facts or evidence; all she has is the note that she never turns into the police. Instead, she imagines who Magda might have been, who might have killed her and why, creating whole lives out of thin air and obsessing about them until they seem quite real to her.

"Moshfegh deftly handles the increasing sense of dread and disorientation, but she never makes it easy for her characters or readers to parse out the truth from fantasy in this strange and paranoid literary offering."

Vesta pictures Magda as a young woman coming from Belarus to work at a summer fast-food job and staying in the town of Levant to get away from the abusive men in her family back home. She lives in the basement of Shirley, a hard-working single mom with a teenage son named Blake. Blake is in love with Magda and would do anything for her, including hiding her body in the woods by Vesta’s house. But Blake would never harm the hard-edged and already world-weary Magda. So who killed her? Could it have been her boyfriend, Leo? A disfigured local shopkeeper? A police officer inhabited by an evil force?

While Vesta seems at least partly aware of her inventions --- she uses guidelines to create fictional characters in order to sketch out what she knows about Magda and Blake --- she loses her grasp on them. In a matter of days, they become heartbreakingly and terrifyingly real to her.

Vesta’s search for the truth about Magda brings up memories of her life with Walter, and they shift as she allows herself to see his faults and weaknesses more clearly. At first blush, Walter appears as a striking intellectual, but as Vesta’s recollections become more honest, he shifts into a cold, cruel philanderer. Then again, can Vesta and her memories be trusted?
 
DEATH IN HER HANDS is a claustrophobic novel. Vesta’s view of self is narrow, her reality is narrowing, and her mind is growing crowded and perhaps diseased. The trauma she gives to Magda could point to trauma of her own, though Moshfegh is purposely abstruse. It is clear, though, that Vesta is disintegrating; an imagination that once may have been pleasant, useful and creative has turned darkly inward instead of out to the world. Vesta is judgmental and bitter. Whether or not that is new to her, she is not a sympathetic character, though she is an interesting one.
 
Not quite a murder mystery, thriller or horror story, but edging close to each, DEATH IN HER HANDS plays with reliability as Vesta, isolated and suppressing her fears and unhappiness, moves toward the novel’s tragic conclusion. Moshfegh deftly handles the increasing sense of dread and disorientation, but she never makes it easy for her characters or readers to parse out the truth from fantasy in this strange and paranoid literary offering.

Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman on June 25, 2020

Death in Her Hands
by Ottessa Moshfegh

  • Publication Date: June 22, 2021
  • Genres: Fiction, Suspense, Thriller
  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Books
  • ISBN-10: 1984879375
  • ISBN-13: 9781984879370