Decomposition Book, Sara Van Os’s debut novel, is a deeply strange and surprisingly tender book about loneliness, connection, and the lengths we’ll go to hold onto someone who makes us feel less alone. It’s funny in the way only truly sad things can be — Savannah’s inner monologue is relentless and real, and her OCD intrusive thoughts are rendered with a specificity that will feel uncomfortably familiar to many readers. The dual structure — Savannah’s present-tense unraveling alongside Ava’s past-tense journal — builds toward a question the novel asks without quite answering: what does it mean to finally find your person, if that person is already gone?
After a catastrophic falling-out with her best friend, Savannah retreats to her parents’ empty lake house in upstate New York, where she spends her days in a fog of wine and obsessive, spiraling thoughts. She has no plan, no real purpose — just the particular kind of aimless grief that comes from losing someone you loved and knowing, at least partly, that it was your fault.
Then one morning she wakes up in the woods behind the house, next to a dead body.
Any reasonable person would call the police. Savannah reads the journal.
It belongs to Ava — a hiker who got lost in the wilderness and spent her final months fighting to survive, documenting every desperate, darkly funny, heartbreaking day. As Savannah moves through Ava’s pages, something unexpected happens: she starts to fall for her. Not just as a story, but as a person — sharp, irreverent, fully alive on the page in a way that makes the cold fact of her death feel unbearable.
Asale Angel-Ajani: Decomposition Book has such a singular premise — a grieving woman who finds a dead body and chooses to stay with it rather than call for help. Where did that idea come from, and how did you know it was a novel? Also, can you talk about any research you had to do for this book — what did you have to learn to capture your vivid descriptions?
Sara Van Os: I’ve always been fascinated by decomposition. It freaks me out, mostly because I find it unsettling that we can love someone and hold someone for a lifetime, but want to get rid of their corpse as soon as they die. There’s something in us, whether it’s culture or instinct or both, that makes us repulsed by the dead body. But if you really think about it, a dead body is safer than a live one. A corpse is gross, but it won’t hurt you. It won’t talk back and tell you you’re wrong, won’t be judgmental or cruel. And grief kind of makes you feel like you’re rotting and feral at the same time. I figured it would be an interesting combo platter of a book, and I knew it was a novel because novels are all I do. I just don’t really write anything else.
AAA: Savannah is isolated, self-destructive, and deeply lonely — but also wickedly funny. How did you find her voice, and how did you balance making her sympathetic without softening her edges?
SVO: Savannah was such a difficult character to write, purely on a technical level. I worked so, so hard on her and one of my main challenges was making her sympathetic. She needed to be lovable in order for the reader to have the patience to continue with her. Being inside of an OCD brain, speaking from personal experience, is annoying and repetitive by nature, and it was of the utmost importance to me that the OCD rep be accurate. And hoarding someone’s corpse while you know that her family and friends are out there somewhere, suffering the immense pain of not knowing, that this affects not only Ava’s loved ones, but also Megan’s and Chad’s, is pretty much inarguably a problematic way to cope. But I needed the reader to love her in spite of her actions, to see her as almost reasonable, lovable. One of the ways I decided to do that was to make her really funny. Also, sick dark humor is one of my own coping mechanisms when things go wrong. And OCD is inherently hilarious. My compulsions are so stupid sometimes. Savannah’s always also very respectful to the corpse. That was important to making her sympathetic too. She really does at least let Ava rest in peace.
AAA: You chose to tell Ava’s story through the pages of her journal — her own words, her own voice, written in her final days. What drew you to that form rather than, say, a traditional flashback structure? How did writing a dead woman’s diary feel different from writing a living narrator?
SVO: Okay so, lowkey, the actual reason was that I did this Oregon Trail project in the eighth grade where we had to make the journal of someone our age traveling with their family on The Oregon Trail and trying not to die of dysentery and I was sitting there, staining paper with coffee to make it look old, and convincing my mom to let me make a mess in the kitchen to make my own hardtack to tape inside. I pressed wildflowers. I killed off this poor bitch’s whole family. My teacher was like ‘damn, the kid’s dark’. I wanted to throw it back to being twelve and making my social studies teacher question me about whether or not things were okay at home, while giving me an A plus. Honestly, writing a dead character didn’t feel any different than writing a live one to me, but that might be because I’ve written a dead main character before. One of the books I wrote in high school was from the POV of a girl who had killed herself and was spending her afterlife watching her former best friends grieve.
AAA: The novel blurs the line between grief, longing, and the supernatural — we’re never quite sure if Ava’s ghost is real or a symptom of Savannah’s unraveling. Was that ambiguity intentional from the start, or did it evolve in the writing?
SVO: The ambiguity was intentional from the start and very carefully calibrated. I wanted the reader to be questioning everything the whole time. Also, my OCD has turned me into an unreliable narrator on a number of occasions. It wouldn’t be authentic to the OCD experience if anyone could tell what the fuck was going on from the inside of Savannah’s head.
AAA: At its core this is a love story of sorts — about the strange, desperate hunger for connection. Do you think Savannah and Ava’s bond would have been possible if Ava were alive? What does it say about loneliness that their relationship only becomes possible in death?
SVO: I don’t think that Ava would have had nearly as much appeal to Savannah if she made it through the woods and into Savannah’s house as a survivor. The appeal of Ava to Savannah is that she’s a blank slate who will never bite back. I don’t know if this decision says as much about the experience of loneliness to me as much as it does about the experience of trauma. Savannah’s lonely, yes, but she’s also too afraid to seek out the help of anyone living, because of how deeply she’s been hurt by the living before.
AAA: What did the process of writing your novel teach you about yourself as a writer? What advice would you give to a writer who might be sitting on a story that some might consider strange, and what books or film/music/shows did you turn to during more difficult writing moments?
SVO: I definitely watched the fuck out of Yellowjackets while I was writing this book, Naked and Afraid as well. Also, Bunny by Mona Awad. I read and reread The Hunger Games books for the comfort of them; you need a comfort book when you’re writing a book this crazy and dark. I also watched a ton of opera, specifically Tosca and Norma, and studied the way the singers moved. I wanted the drama of the book, the swell of it, to feel as big as the emotional swell of a tragic opera, especially because Ava is an opera singer. This book taught me my limits as a writer. I stretched my brain thinner than I’ve ever stretched my brain before. I used all the technique in my arsenal at the time. It was so important to me that my first book out was the absolute best I had to give.
AAA: Are you working or thinking about a next project? Any themes, characters, or ideas that you feel you had to leave on the drafting floor that you’d like to return to?
SVO: I am! The book that’s hopefully going to come out third is already drafted, but we’ll see if that actually happens. I’m actively writing the book that’s said to come out second with Hanover Press, as Decomposition Book was sold in a two-book deal. I’m not really returning to anything from this book, except for my ever-present obsession with death, which I’m sure will be in all of my upcoming work, as will lesbianism. I can’t imagine I’ll ever write a book where there isn’t something sapphic in its center. My next book will be about a slow apocalypse caused by too many people dying at work. It will be gay and chaotic, and, with any luck, also beautiful and funny. I saw a meme the other week in which someone requested The Pitt, but it’s a night shift at a Waffle House, and that’s basically the vibe I’m going for with this next project!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sara van Os is a Mexican-American decomposition nerd who lives in Harlem with her wife and two cats. She has a bachelor’s degree from NYU in English and German and a minor in Clarinet Performance, because she loves a good side quest. Since college, she has been working in hospitality as everyone’s favorite manager and lives to gather stories of weird happenings at work. Decomposition Book is her debut novel.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Asale Angel-Ajani is the author of the novel, A Country You Can Leave, a NY Times recommended book and an Amazon Fiction Editor’s Choice, as well as the nonfiction books Strange Trade and the forthcoming memoir, Fugitive Archives. Originally from California, she lives in New York City.