DECOMPOSITION BOOK

A woman stumbles on a body in the woods and treats it as an unusual—and unsettling—companion.

Twenty-one-year-old Savannah, on a “mental health vacation” from her last semester of college, is hiding at her divorcing parents’ lake house. Lonely, struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and unsure of her sexuality, she recently lost all her friends after an incident with a manipulative ex-best friend (who now lingers as a hallucination) and self-medicates with alcohol and Ambien. One night in March, after mixing the two, she sleepwalks into the woods behind the house and jolts awake next to a corpse. The body, freshly deceased, belongs to Ava Brown, a gay opera singer stuck in an office job. Nearby is Ava’s backpack, containing a composition book aptly labeled the “DEComposition Book” and filled with a record of Ava’s last days. Rather than call the police, Savannah decides to wait—until she’s read the journal, and until the body is nothing but bones, until she’s said everything she needs to say. The novel alternates between Savannah’s present-day isolation and Ava’s journal entries, which recount how a Labor Day weekend hiking trip with her co-workers Megan and Chad went terribly awry. The narrative allows for vivid, unsettling descriptions of decay (“green and purple splotches on her skin are a cursed moldy pizza dough”). Savannah is an imperfect, often frustrating protagonist, but her poor decisions make her compulsively absorbing—readers will keep turning the pages to see what she does next. The book targets a Gen Z audience; slang like “sus” and “slaps” can be jarring, though some pop-culture moments (“Bobby Flay pulls out crispy rice again. The judges eat it up, literally. He wins, again. The crowd boos”) land well. Fans of Yellowjackets will eat up this queer, psychologically chaotic tale.

A decadently bizarre novel for fans of queer survival stories.