Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

Decomposition Book

Rate this book
"A slippery page-turner that's as profoundly beautiful as it is totally unhinged."
—Rachel Harrison, New York Times bestselling author of Play Nice and So Thirsty

"Intense, irreverent, surprising, raw."
—Natalia Theodoridou, author of Sour Cherry

An emotional, electrifying, and darkly hilarious debut about a woman who finds a dead body and can’t give up its ghost, for fans of Mona Awad, Yellowjackets, and weird girl fiction.


Spiraling from a disastrous falling-out with her best friend, Savannah retreats to her parents’ empty lake house in upstate New York to tend her wounds. Isolated and reeling from rejection, she spends her days in a fog, drinking and overthinking in equal worrisome measure. Until she wakes up one morning in the woods behind the house—next to a dead body.

Instead of calling the police, Savannah reads the journal she finds nearby, reliving the last desperate months of this woman’s life lost in the wilderness, fighting for survival. Ava, as it turns out, is more than just a cold, lonely corpse. She was funny. She was smart. And Savannah has finally found someone she can talk to…

As she pushes deeper into Ava’s harrowing story, Savannah notices a change, a shift in her reality. Each page brings her closer to the Ava from the journal…and the ghost before her now. Before long, Savannah feels something for Ava she hasn’t felt for anyone else—and there’s a good chance letting go would haunt her for the rest of her life.

Is Savannah finally losing her grip? Or has she found the friend she’s needed all along?

9 pages, Audiobook

First published May 19, 2026

Loading...
Loading...

About the author

Sara van Os

1 book21 followers
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.

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
143 (40%)
4 stars
130 (36%)
3 stars
48 (13%)
2 stars
27 (7%)
1 star
5 (1%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 213 reviews
Profile Image for luceski.
104 reviews7 followers
December 30, 2025
Nothing says “self‑care” like waking up beside a corpse and accidentally gaining a free therapist.

Decomposition Book is one of those stories that sneaks up on you - darkly funny, deliciously descriptive and quietly devastating. It opens with a hike gone wrong and spirals into a reality‑bending duet between Ava (who is very much decomposing) and Savannah - who is very much not okay.

Two POVs, two unraveling minds and one emotional‑support corpse she definitely didn’t sign up for.

Savannah’s intrusive thoughts? Relatable. The way their realities start to blur and intertwine? Chef’s kiss chaos.

If you like your fiction a little weird, a little tender, and a little decomposing around the edges… this one’s for you!
Profile Image for Clara Gauthier.
178 reviews5 followers
January 16, 2026
This is THE novel for fans of Yellowjackets, especially if you’re looking for homoerotic hauntings, a compelling survival narrative, lesbian repression, and mentally ill young woman coping.

Von Os’s stunning debut follows Savannah, a 21 year old on a semester off collage due to a dramatic fall out with her manipulative ex-best friend currently staying at her mom’s house in the woods. Her days consist of her waning away the hours until she can take her Ambien at midnight, usually by self-medicating with wine, until after one night of mixing the two when she wakes up next to a dead girl, Ava, in the forest. However, Savannah can’t make herself report the body. She makes herself a promise: she’ll call the cops about the body when it is fully decomposed, taking the time in between to read the mysterious journal left behind.

I was obsessed with both perspectives in this novel, especially Ava’s. Van Os’s prose is spectacular and she conveys such feeling in her imagery. This novel also has lots of brilliant lesbian feelings, both sad and sweet, that just really made me love it all the more. Definitely more atmospheric than scary, but not a bad thing when done well, which this one definitely does! I can’t wait for May when I can shove the physical version into everyone’s hands. Thanks to Netgalley and HarperCollins for the ARC!!
Profile Image for BookishlySonia.
267 reviews45 followers
May 23, 2026
Yeah I cried. A lot.


In Decomposition Book we follow Savannah and Ava, two women at very different points in their lives. Reeling from a traumatic friendship breakup, Savannah is hiding away in a cabin in the woods when she stumbles across a dead body and begins reading the nearby journal documenting Ava’s time lost in the wilderness.

Ava’s timeline is filled with tension and horror as she fights to survive with seemingly no way out. It’s an incredible and harrowing survival story that had me completely gripped. Savannah’s timeline is quieter but equally devastating, filled with despair, raw vulnerability, and increasingly intrusive thoughts as she tries to piece herself back together.

This book felt pretty damn flawless to me. The pacing, the plotting, the way the timelines complement each other, the prose that manages to be both witty and raw, every piece of it worked. It’s such a technically impressive book that I could’ve loved it for that alone, but it’s also incredibly moving, vulnerable, honest, and genuinely heart wrenching.

It’s also sapphic as fuck, and in a world where that label gets slapped onto books where the main relationship is with a man until the final pages, I really appreciated that this story is unapologetically about women loving women. It’s also deeply a coming-of-age story and a realization of queerness, and as someone who didn’t come out until 30, this felt painfully authentic despite the character being younger. You can tell the sapphic label meant something real to this author beyond just marketing.

Another layer that really stood out to me was the handling of mental health. At no point did it feel exploitative or careless. Everything was written with empathy, nuance, and respect, even in the hardest moments.

I also had the ALC, and the audiobook production was phenomenal. Jess Nahikian and Gail Shalan were absolutely transportive. So often narrators sound like they’re simply reading from a script, but both of them fully embodied these characters. The sighs, pauses, cracks in their voices, the moments of pain, tenderness, and wonder, I felt all of it. It genuinely elevated an already incredible story into one of the best audiobook experiences I’ve had in a long time.

Huge thank you to The Hive and NetGalley for the ALC. All thoughts are my own.
Profile Image for LX.
430 reviews18 followers
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
February 24, 2026
Thank you for the E-ARC

4.5 ⭐ Rounded up!

This was a wild ride from start to finish. I was enthralled, confused, invested, wondering, laughing, grimacing you name it!

Honestly, best thing to do is go in blind! LOOOOOL unhinged but also with heartfelt, relatable moments.

The way that I felt Savannah was written throughout her story was great because the struggle felt real as well as the spiral we go on. As well as reading about Ava and Megan's development. One part got me just looking away from my phone like oof okay.

The blur further on in the story is really one that just leaves you wondering wtf is going on in the best way!

Some parts I preferred than others and I do sort of wish there was more to help me settle my questions but that's just me!!!

Truly a weird, wild and a great ride of a debut!!
Profile Image for Erin Larson-Burnett.
Author 3 books85 followers
January 31, 2026
To put it as eloquently as I can, this book is a major cringefest and not the good kind
Profile Image for quillnqueer.
813 reviews639 followers
May 21, 2026
Finding a New Best Friend in the form of a corpse in the woods is great until you remember that they were a Real Person With Feelings

This had a very shaky start for me, and I almost DNFd - the author seemed fixated on mentioning Every Brand Ever, but luckily this petered out after 50 pages or so as the story found it's footing. This is a dark, sad story focused on grief, and healing.
Profile Image for Erica | wittyreading.
619 reviews36 followers
May 20, 2026
Wow. This was so incredibly well done. It's raw, beautiful, unhinged and has the perfect amount of body horror. There is trauma, obsession, survival elements and even some spicy scenes. I cried when it was over because the emotions of these characters transcended through the author's words. They felt real to me and I was overwhelmed with grief for each of them in separate ways. I really appreciated Savannah's OCD representation and how it was realistically portrayed in the story.

The audiobook narration is absolutely fantastic and enhances the overall reading experience. Both narrators did an incredible job of bringing the characters to life.

Thank you Harlequin Audio for providing this advanced listening copy for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
Profile Image for hania.
36 reviews44 followers
May 27, 2026
author should uninstall tiktok from her phone and im being so serious right now. i never want to see "gaslight gatekeep girlboss" or "gay math" in a book EVER again!!!!
Profile Image for Casey Bee.
789 reviews67 followers
April 28, 2026
I went into this book blind, all I knew was that the cover had me sold. I didn't know what to expect, but what I didn't expect was such an emotionally intense story. It's really weird, and simultaneously really sad. It has occasional humorous moments with some of the references to Twilight and Finding Nemo and such, which means it will land with some and not with others. At its core, this is really about loneliness, trauma, and mental health. Savannah is in such a low place and so desperate for a friend, that when she discovers a corpse in the woods, instead of reporting it, she befriends it. Ava will listen without judgement. I am not going to say much, the book actually leaves me feeling bereft and not wanting to write a lot. While Savannah might be an extreme case, it does make me sad to know that people feel this lonely and this despondent. I did really enjoy it, because I like weird and sad things, but it won't be for everyone. Major TW on grape, btw.

Thanks to The Hive for providing an early ALC. The audio was well done with dual narration. Book releases 5/19/26.
Profile Image for thatmillennialbookgirl.
273 reviews12 followers
May 2, 2026
The premise of this one sounded interesting to me.
Morbid but interesting! Unfortunately I wasn't a big fan of this book.

Savannah's parts were very repetitive and honestly not much happens so you're in her head a lot, which is quite exhausting. She has OCD so I understand the repetition, l really do. It just wasn't very interesting being in her head so much and I wasn't invested in her chapters. There are a lot of pop culture references that really made me cringe and took me out of the story. I wasn't a fan of the humor.

I would have DNFed if not for Ava's chapters (Ava is the woman whose body Savannah discovers). Ava's chapters are excerpts from a journal she had been writing about what happened after she and some coworkers got lost in the forest and are trying to survive. I felt more invested in Ava's story as I do tend to have an interest in wilderness survival stories (even though in this case we learn very early on that Ava obviously doesn't survive).

The story is entertaining and mostly held my interest (at least Ava's chapters did). I was hoping for a few big twists but honestly it mostly played out the way I expected. This one does have lots of rave reviews so far though so take my review with a grain of salt! I do think a specific type of reader may really enjoy this story especially if you appreciate weird girl lit and pop culture references.
Profile Image for domsbookden.
295 reviews203 followers
Did Not Finish
May 19, 2026
DNF 39%

I never quite got into this because I’m simply not the intended audience for it. There is an abundance of quippy dialogue and pop culture references, and while there is nothing inherently wrong with these elements, I personally don’t enjoy stories with that tone. This narrative style is very distracting to me.

I think readers who enjoy the works of Tatiana Schlote-Bonne will have a better experience with this.
Profile Image for Kendall Saunders.
259 reviews49 followers
April 28, 2026
Decomposition Book surprised me in the best way. Truthfully, I was so annoyed with our main character at first that I wasn’t sure if I was even going to like this one at all. Her choices seemed beyond wild, her internal monologue was a bit childish, and she was just unlikable in general at first. However, as the story progressed, what she did and her actions really started to make sense.

This gorgeous, raw, profound novel is hard to characterize, but the best way I can think of is grief horror with LGBTQ themes and a tinge of weird girl lit. We have multiple POVs with two heart wrenching and tragic stories weaved together, aligning perfectly to have you gutted by the end.

The audiobook was done flawlessly. The narrators Jess Nahikan and Gail Shalan performed this story incredibly well, and I would absolutely recommend consuming this book in an audio format.

Thank you @netgalley & Harlequin Audio for this ALC!
Profile Image for Kara.
162 reviews15 followers
April 27, 2026
If you want to be devastated… this is the one! Def one of the saddest books I’ve ever read. So if weird + sad is your vibe, this is gonna be an easy 5/5.

The author’s writing is funny and reads like talking to an old friend. The plot is beautiful enough and will break your heart without the need for fluff or purple prose. I think most of the target audience will see themselves in either Ava or Savannah, which makes the book even more painful to get through. Yet another recent read with fantastic OCD rep!

So, what would you do if you stumbled across a corpse in the woods? Inspect it? Report it to the authorities?? Bury it?! Run away and pretend you never saw it!!? Our MC is so lonely that she decides to befriend and deeply bond with it. That’s the plot, enjoy.

Thank you so much to the author, Sara van Os, for sending me a digital copy! It will become widely available on 05.19.26 and is one that I’ll be constantly ruminating on until I receive a physical copy for reread<3
Profile Image for Shae Bentley.
365 reviews23 followers
May 20, 2026
5⭐️ - Well… it’s only May, but I think I might’ve already found my favourite book of the year. I genuinely don’t even know how to put into words how much I loved this one 😩

It follows Savannah, who retreats to her parent’s empty lake house after a falling out with her ex best friend. She’s isolated, drinking too much, thinking too much, and trying desperately to outrun the aftermath of a friendship that turned manipulative and cruel. Then she finds a body in the woods.

Nearby is a journal, and instead of calling the police, Savannah starts reading about the final months of Ava’s life. She becomes completely consumed by Ava, looking her up online and slowly piecing together who she was, until the whole thing turns into this intense (and a tad unhealthy 👹) fixation.

OH MY GOD. This book was beautiful and bizarre and I loved every second of it. The story is told through dual perspectives, Savannah and Ava, and both were heartbreaking in completely different ways. I also wasn’t expecting to laugh as much as I did. There’s so much genuine humour woven through all the heaviness.

I listened to the audiobook and it honestly elevated the entire experience. Both narrators completely understood their characters and brought so much personality and emotion to the performance. I’d absolutely recommend that format if you can get it.

I don’t want to say too much because I think this is one of those books that’s best experienced knowing as little as possible, but PLEASE drop everything and read it immediately!!!

The fact that this is a debut genuinely blows my mind because it’s written with so much confidence and control. It’s a story about grief, obsession, loneliness, connection and that desperate need to feel understood when your own mind doesn’t even feel safe to live in. Oh, and the romance?! 😮‍💨👌🏼

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this book since I finished it. I desperately need a physical copy because not only is the story phenomenal, but that cover?! Absolutely top tier 😍

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Bolinda Audio for the ALC.
Profile Image for saturnn.
58 reviews12 followers
December 29, 2025
i’ve been given the opportunity to receive this arc in exchange of an honest review: i planned to dnf this however i wanted to see it out and i ended up reading it all

honestly at first i was hooked and then it got fever dream heavy. i liked savannah and there were certain lines that hit home especially when she’s kind of announcing how lonely she feels, however she annoyed me really quick i didn’t really see a point in her perspective anymore after a few chapters she just felt so annoying & pointless.

i enjoyed the writing within Ava’s story and how she wrote her life within the journal it was an interesting plot line that i don’t think i’ve seen done before.

the writing was not bad but it also was not the best…why are we mentioning “looking at the solar eclipse like trump”, “scrolling on Tiktok” “WAP by cardi B” and so much more it just felt disappointing reading i literally couldn’t do anything other than eye roll it did not belong in the book whatsoever there are so many analogies that could’ve been used also trigger warning a phrase using the word “r*pist” was used when michelle had put her legs on savannah early on no idea why ?? but was uncomfortable after there was like no reason what so ever to put that line there.

the writing with ava though again was good! she was the only plot and character i liked in the sense of writing it flowed it was fast & it didn’t feel like a bore to get through.

the story then just got weird out of nowhere, it felt like one of those horror lit fic books kinda like bunny..but the opposite where you literally don’t know what you’re reading anymore because so much is happening and so much rambling is going on.

savannah has some sort of illness and sees her ex bestfriend michelle someway somehow? she’s obsessed with death and at some point starts talking to you the reader (i really got confused here bc it happened outta nowhere). i honestly don’t even know how to explain her character 3

i’m sad this book wasn’t as good as i hoped the plot had so much potential but i hope others enjoy it more than i did & wishing the author best of luck in their next !!

thank you to harper collins / harlequin trade publishing for the ARC in exchange for an honest review !
Profile Image for Lorin (paperbackbish).
1,146 reviews96 followers
April 30, 2026
Thank you Sara and Hanover Square for my free copy of Decomposition Book by Sara van Os — out May 19!

» READ IF YOU «
🪲 have a high tolerance for visceral body horror (yummy)
🌲 love a queer survival story with some emotional gut-punch
👻 prefer your trauma healing to be deeply weird

» SYNOPSIS «
Spiraling after a brutal fight with her bestie, Savannah wakes up in the woods literally NEXT TO a dead body—so she calls the police, right? Right?! Well. First she's got to read the body's journal, of course. According to it, Ava got lost in the wilderness with some friends and she's ended up right here. Ava, it turns out, is much better company than anyone Savannah has left.

» REVIEW «
The audacity!! DE-composition book?! Sara. I think I love you. The alternating structure—Savannah's increasingly unhinged reality, alongside Ava's journal entries from her final days in the Adirondacks—is so brilliantly executed. Both women are grieving and falling apart in wildly different ways, but it's so compelling to watch their pain become a transformative force.

The body horror does not hold back, and I mean that as a compliment. The truly grotesque details of decomposition have some real weight, especially when you actually sit and think about what this would look/smell/feel like. Savannah's attachment to Ava as her corpse gradually rots is uncomfortable, but kind of beautiful? It really says so much about what healing from trauma looks like when you feel you've no one safe to do it with. A wildly confident, wholly original debut—Sara, you've got me.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Profile Image for Trina &#x1f5a4;.
321 reviews55 followers
May 21, 2026
Short chapters. Dual POV.

We were able to experience Savannah’s extreme grief & sadness while exploring the deep depths of mental illness.

Ava’s journal entries were a unique and haunting way to get to know her. I really enjoyed this aspect.

The body horror in this book was superb! Deliciously descriptive, daring you not to feel all the oozy, decaying, gore. Fully unhinged & delightfully disgusting.

I did not however care for the bits of spice & underlying romance that was woven throughout the book. Especially the second half which was fully focused on it. There was a lot of the story I was desperately waiting to be uncovered but it never happened. I did end the book feeling disappointed.

There was a lot to love but not all of it was for me. After much thought I decided on a rating of 2.75 rounded up to 3 for this review.

Thank you SO much to the author for providing me a copy of this book with the most beautifully stunning cover I’ve seen in a long time!!
Profile Image for Brunchatiffanys.
292 reviews1 follower
May 20, 2026
Thank you NetGalley and Harlequin Audio for this ARC Copy!

This book was a wild ride and I somehow managed to read the entire Audiobook in one sitting. I just had to know what was going to happen next. It gives a really realistic picture of what it is like to live with OCD, how people who are neurodivergent can be treated differently/mistreated, the struggles associated with your own sexuality, and just how far we will go to survive. The FMC is clearly suffering due to an event that took place at school, which is what the entire book is leading up to, but it also leads you down so many different roads with twist and turns while you get to the final destination. It is a hard read, but I really enjoyed it from start to finish.
Profile Image for Ranash_books.
139 reviews22 followers
May 22, 2026
Thank you NetGalley for the arc!!

If you find a body at the forest next to your house - you keep it. Right? Right???
Well. That’s what Savannah did.

She finds a body with a… journal?
And the journal tell the story of how Ava and her friends got lost at the woods - and how inevitably, they died.
But as the story continues… things are not as they seem and you find more things about Savannah and why she’s… like this?

I loved this. I love sapphic characters in horror books and loved the writing style
Profile Image for Pamela.
590 reviews28 followers
May 28, 2026
4.5 If you spent your childhood playing in the woods, and then you grew up and watched things like Yellowjackets, Send Help, and Black Swan, then this is THE book for you.

It’s delicate and broken, but also fierce and comforting. Also, really humorous!

Gaslight. Gatekeep. Girl boss. 🎀💪
Profile Image for Anni.
61 reviews3 followers
May 4, 2026
I really enjoyed this one, a blend of survival thriller, mental health suspense and pop culture humour. I listened to the audiobook and loved the narrators, Jess Nahikian and Gail Shalan.

Ava’s chapters were my favourite; I loved how she was portrayed in the face of horror, and I was desperate to hear more of her story. Savannah, on the other hand, was a truly insufferable nepo baby, but the humour carried her through.

I genuinely couldn’t put this book down. It’s perfect ‘weird girl fiction,’ and I’m already looking forward to finding more books like this.
Profile Image for Sally.
345 reviews82 followers
May 22, 2026
4 ⭐️ this was so refreshing! Queer, body horror, and survivalism. I went into this audiobook blind and I was pleasantly surprised through out the whole book. I was like there’s no way this is going to happen then it happened and I was like 😮 she truly deserves an applause for this one cause I’ve never read anything quite like this before and I loved it 🤭
Profile Image for Jessica.
152 reviews8 followers
April 20, 2026
Written from 2 different POVs, our narrators break our hearts while stripping down to the ugly, gruesome, and manic truth that lies inside of our minds. Reading this felt voyeuristic at times as we delve deep into the mind of Savannah who is ravaged with grief, OCD, paranoia, and a longing to be loved.

As an audiobook, this was top-notch in every way possible. The dual narrators did an exquisite job of differentiating between the 2 characters both in tone and overall personalities. The deeper, slower paced voice of Ava paired next to the higher-pitched, franticly chaotic voice of Savannah gave a depth to each character that I truly feel made this a superb listen.

Savannah has taken a break from school to spend time focusing on healing from a traumatic experience, staying in a family cabin by herself in upstate New York. One night after some drinking and taking an Ambien, she wakes up the next morning in the woods next to a body. What unravels next is the story of the body, Ava, as told through her journal entries of what happened to her and her co-workers to ventured out camping and ultimately did not survive.

Part gruesome and boldly horrific, part devastating and gut-wrenchingly beautiful, Van Os explores love, loss, and mental illness in a raw and unrelenting way. A bold new voice that will forever be an auto-buy author for me.

Thank you to NetGalley & Harlequin Audio for this advanced listener’s copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own and are left voluntarily.
Profile Image for Amanda Marie.
487 reviews6 followers
May 23, 2026
3.5⭐️

This is a funny, freaky little book that I did very much enjoy. It just had some issues that I thought maybe weren’t issues and were going to turn into a twist. And I was a little disappointed when that didn’t happen. The ending falls a little flat instead. But overall, this is still very entertaining, extremely millennial coded, and a great debut.
Profile Image for Lorrie Ness.
107 reviews1 follower
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
April 26, 2026
Thank you to NetGalley and the author for a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Isolated in her family’s cabin, Savannah takes leave from college to care for her mental health following a traumatic event with a friend. Plagued by guilt, betrayal and OCD (made even worse by the trauma), Savannah seeks relief through alcohol and Ambien and wakes up in the woods next to a corpse. After reading the journal she finds with the body, she learns about Ava’s months-long fight for survival, lost in the woods.

Standard protocol for finding a dead body usually involves calling the police. But the thing about Ava is, her personality leaps off the page as Savannah reads her journal. And she quietly listens. No judgement. With Ava, Savannah is safe to bear her soul and connect with another woman in a way that never risks rejection or pain.

So…no cops. Savannah is in too fragile a state to let the opportunity to connect with Ava go. She needs all the friends she can get, even if it’s a corpse. But after a couple of weeks reading the journal and visiting Ava’s body, something happens that causes her to deeply question her own reality and the plot becomes tightly anchored around this.

This story is a unique blend of survival horror and weird girl lit that fans of Bunny by Mona Awad and Hysteria by Jessica Gross would adore. Personally, I felt this leaned more heavily toward weird girl lit than horror. Check this one out if you are drawn to stories with messy characters who society might consider “unhinged,” but who have personal wounds driving their decisions, which you will come to understand and empathize with as the novel progresses.

Don’t go into this novel expecting heart-pounding action. It’s a slow-burn, psychological story rooted in just two locations, Savannah’s cabin and the woods behind the property. The plot progresses through reading Ava’s survival journal and through Savannah’s interiority and flashbacks related to trauma. The story features incredible depictions of OCD, and an amazing author’s note about this and other topics that should not be skipped!

It very much feels like a story anchored in the pressures of our times and the toll our modern world takes on mental health and wellbeing. It feels adjacent to the experience of younger generations and maybe not one that’s as recognizable to someone who grew up decades ago.
This debut grabbed me by the throat and shook! I will absolutely be looking for the next work by Sara van Os!

This story explores sensitive topics. Some characters use slurs that could be triggering. There are also frank discussions of assault, death, grief and scenes involving body horror.


Profile Image for Danielle Strona.
148 reviews8 followers
May 5, 2026
Thank you, NetGalley and Harlequin Audio, for the ALC in exchange for an honest review!

Savannah is reeling after the devastating fallout with her best friend, so she retreats to her parents’ remote lake house to pick up the pieces. Along and untethered, she fills her days nursing the wounds left and wandering around the property and into the woods, until she wakes up one morning in the woods next to a dead body. Panicked and unsure of what to do, Savannah doesn’t call the police. Instead, she finds a journal lying next to the girl, Ava, and begins to read it. Through its pages, Ava comes back to life: not just as a body in the woods, but a fully realized person with fears, desires, and a story that led her to that final moment. As Savannah becomes consumed by Ava’s words, she feels an unexpected connection growing between them. But the deeper she dives into the journal, the more her reality begins to shift. Each page pulls her close to Ava, until Ava is no longer on paper, but a presence Savannah can’t escape. As the lines between grief, obsession, and something supernatural begin to blur, Savannah is left questioning whether she’s unraveling or finally finding the connection she’s been searching for all along.

I couldn’t put this story down once it picked up momentum. The dual perspectives, Savannah’s in the present and Ava’s through the journal, were great. It showed a whole new perspective that helped to understand why characters made the decisions that they did. If you’re a fan of Yellowjackets, you’ll likely find a similar appeal in this story, with its mix of psychological tension, complex female relationships, and creeping unease. The audiobook experience also added another dimension entirely. Both narrators delivered great performances that captured the raw emotion and sadness in each character, making the tension feel immediate and real.

I love Savannah and feel deeply sympathetic towards her character. She’s isolated, grieving, and clearly searching for a connection in a world where she feels abandoned. Her attachment to Ava is unsettling, but also understandable in its own way. The story explores themes of loss and mental health with care, even when it leans into ambiguous territory. But by the end, I felt both satisfied and heartbroken. It closes on a note that feels fitting for Savannah’s journey, and it’s one that lingers long after the final word. Overall, I highly recommend this book!
Profile Image for Sammantha (its_a_literary_life).
385 reviews9 followers
February 4, 2026
This one completely caught me off guard in the best way! This debut left me feeling somber and empty and I think speaks volumes for mental health, trauma, grief, and surviving yourself.

Van Os dives headfirst into the morbid and the metaphorical. Savannah, staying at her parents isolated vacation home and healing from personal trauma, wakes up beside a dead body in the woods, and instead of reporting it, she proceeds to read the departed woman’s journal while the corpse literally decomposes in the forest. What ensues is a strange, uneasy blend of psychological introspection, queer longing, and creeping unreality.

Healing is not linear and I think this book shows that. It’s cyclical and messy.

I will say in the beginning I was more intrigued with Ava's story but as the story developed I kept thinking about what was real and not through Savannah's perspective. The blurb says this is "darkly humorous" and I find the eggshell sharp humor here to be far and few.

The lake front setting is both isolated but seemingly beautiful in spite of the decaying corpse in the woods. Idk but the cover is even beautiful in a morbid way in my opinion. I was both creeped out and emotionally moved with the story by the end.

The queer representation and self destruction is seen from both perspectives. I found Savannah to be almost wallowing in self pity until I found out what happened between her and Michelle.

It's told in alternating perspectives from Savannah in the present to Ava's past and what led her to her death and I think it kept the story moving forward nicely.

There’s something genuinely affecting about the way loneliness, grief, and queer desire get woven through surreal horror.

If you are a fan of weird girl fiction, Yellowjackets, and Mona Awad’s brand of unsettling, genre-blurring storytelling, you HAVE to pick this up.

4.5 stars
Profile Image for Frankie.
91 reviews1 follower
May 8, 2026
2.5⭐️

Decomposition Book by Sara van Os has such an interesting premise and on the surface seems like my exact kind of book, but unfortunately this one just really didn’t work for me. It’s split into two perspectives - Ava, who’s trying survive in the wilderness after getting lost while camping, and Savannah, who’s discovered Ava’s dead body.

Unfortunately, I was WAY more invested in Ava’s story than Savannah’s, but at the same time, neither had the emotional pay off that I wanted because I didn’t get time to feel super connected to either of them. Their character voices were both quite similar and read so much younger than they were supposed to be. There was also a tone shift at some point - I won’t spoil the specifics of it but if you know you know - but it felt so wildly out of place from the rest of the novel that it fully caught me off-guard and I don’t think had the emotional impact it was supposed to.

Overall I just felt this was a little flat. There were a lot of good ideas and the potential for interesting twists but it just needed refining. Savannah is dealing with trauma and in the middle of a mental health crisis, and I think there was a lot of good and important discussion there, and if the book was more focused I think it could have hit me really hard. I don’t think this was a bad book at all and I think a lot of people will love it, sadly it just wasn’t for me.

If you enjoy survival stories, weird girl horror, and and explorations of grief/trauma/mental illness through magical realism I think you should give Decomposition Book a go!

Thanks so much to Sara van Os, Dead Ink Books, and NetGalley for providing an arc of the book!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 213 reviews