Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, believes his mother died giving birth to him. One of Marek’s few consolations is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina. For some people, Ina’s ability to receive transmissions of sacred knowledge from the natural world is a godsend. For others, Ina’s home in the woods is a godless place. The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by their depraved lord and governor, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces arise to upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, and the natural world and the spirit world will prove to be very thin indeed.

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. With very little to go on, our narrator invents a list of murder suspects and possible motives for the crime. Oddly, her suppositions begin to find correspondences in the real world, and 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.

Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for (like the rest of her needs) by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility. What could be so terribly wrong?

There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful and even laugh-out-loud funny. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities. HOMESICK FOR ANOTHER WORLD is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the gamut of individuals representing the human condition. But part of the unique quality of Moshfegh’s voice is the way the grotesque and the outrageous are infused with tenderness and compassion.

Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker and a secretary at the Moorehead boys’ prison, is consumed with resentment and self-loathing that she tempers with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. She also spends her nights and weekends shoplifting and stalking a prison guard named Randy. When the bright and beautiful Rebecca Saint John arrives as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and unable to resist what appears to be a budding friendship.