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.
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