I knew from the premise that Decomposition Book had a very good chance of being my kind of weird, but I was not prepared for how much I would actually love it. A lonely, spiraling woman finds a decomposing corpse in the woods and, instead of doing literally anything a normal person would do, starts reading her journal and talking to her. It’s gross, sad, funny, queer, completely unhinged, and somehow also incredibly tender.

Savannah is such a messy character, and that was probably one of my favorite things about this. She's lonely and obsessive and absolutely not making good decisions, but the book never needed me to believe that she was. Watching her become attached to Ava felt simultaneously ridiculous and devastating because underneath the whole corpse-in-the-woods situation is someone who desperately wants a connection that can't reject or abandon her.

I also loved the way Ava's journal slowly turns her from the body into an actual person. We get her story alongside Savannah's, and the stranger and more intimate their relationship becomes, the more complicated the whole thing feels. There's something deeply uncomfortable about Savannah finding comfort in someone who can't actually consent to being part of that relationship, while at the same time understanding exactly why Savannah is becoming so attached.

And YES, the decomposition is very much part of the book. It doesn't conveniently keep Ava's body pretty or sanitized. The physical reality of death exists right alongside Savannah's growing emotional attachment, which makes their relationship so much stranger. There's something weirdly beautiful about a book being this willing to put tenderness and decay in the same place.

But underneath all the weirdness, this ended up being much sadder than I expected. It's about loneliness, grief, obsession, rejection, and wanting another person to understand you so badly that even a dead woman can start to feel safer than the living.

This is exactly what I want from weird girl horror. Give me women making horrible decisions. Give me complicated queer feelings. Give me a corpse slowly decomposing in the woods while someone has an emotional crisis beside it. I ate this shit UP.

Five stars. Disgusting. Devastating. Gay. Perfect.