DEATH IN HER HANDS

Moshfegh specializes in disturbed and disturbing female narrators, and tells their stories from the inside out, so everything depends on your response to the one voice you hear. Here, a widow in her 70s has moved to a town where she knows no one, to an isolated cabin with no phone and no company but her dog. Why? Ann Marie Lee has pitched the woman's voice in a high and cracking register that suggests a very old and semi-hysterical person. This may work against Moshfegh's deliberately claustrophobic technique in which the suspense comes from trying to gauge just how crazed the narrator may be. Lee's choice telegraphs a lot. There is humor and mystery and horror here, still, and a powerful denouement. B.G. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine [Published: JULY 2020]