Decomposition Book by Sarah Van Os

 

Savannah's life fell apart after a betrayal by her best friend.  Worse than losing her, the friend made herself the victim and Savannah lost all her friends and ended up with a breakdown.  Now out of the hospital, Savannah has convinced her family that what she needs is time by herself in the family's cabin in the woods, a quiet place where she can put herself back together with the help of her therapist.

But Savannah isn't putting herself back together.  She's drinking a lot of wine, taking her prescripted drugs willy-nilly and brooding over and over again about the friendship and what happened.  One night she drinks so much that she passes out in a clearing near the cabin.  

When she wakes the next morning and looks around, she isn't alone.  There is another girl there but she isn't alive.  Savannah can't see any injuries so she doesn't know what caused the girl's death.  There is a journal near her and she takes that back to the cabin to see if she can determine what has happened.

It turns out that the girl's name is Ava and she was lost for weeks in the forest along with two friends, a man and a woman.  Both of them died earlier from various causes and Ava made it this far.  If she had only survived one more day, she could have been rescued.  Savannah is fascinated with her and her first real experience of death.  She knows she should call the police and report the death but as she reads Ava's journal, she starts to feel that she and Ava would have been good friends and that Ava would have understood her as no one else could.  She decides to wait and report the death when Ava is just bones.

This book won't be for everyone.  It is a spiraling view into a mental breakdown plus there are graphic descriptions of how a body decomposes.  It is Sarah Van Os' debut novel.  She is a Mexican-American who lives in New York with her wife and raises pigeons and cats.  The reader is drawn downward and downward, watching Savannah become more entranced and delusional as the days go by and she observes Ava's body and imagines a whole life with them as friends.  It's impossible not to be drawn to Savannah's pain, especially when what the betrayal was is revealed and to wonder in what world did her parents think that leaving her alone in the woods was a great idea for recuperation.  This book is recommended for horror readers.