Excerpts Horror Read an Excerpt From Decomposition Book by Sara van Os A woman finds a dead body and can’t give up its ghost… By Sara van Os | Published on April 28, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Decomposition Book by Sara van Os, out from Hanover Square Press on May 19th. 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? Savannah Something is poking me in the back and I’m cold as fuck. This information on its own is not concerning enough to get me to peel open my probably hungover little eyeballs. I roll off the pokey thing and reach for my comforter, but I come away with a handful of dirt instead. That is enough information to cause me to pry open my definitely hungover little eyeballs. It does not help that I find myself squinting into the cold, cruel light of dawn. “What the fuck?” I say to myself, sitting up with a groan. No way I’m actually lying in the woods in my nightgown. This is it. This is the day I have to check myself into rehab. I stand up and turn to make my walk of shame home, glad that I at least recognize this spot as a place I used to play when I was little, and then I stop so hard I wobble—because I’m looking at a corpse. I’m looking at an actual true-crime-documentary-in-the-woods human woman’s most likely murdered body. For all the times when I was a kid binge-watching Investigation Discovery with my mom, all the times when I knew for sure what I would do if I murdered someone or found a body or any of those shows’ scenarios, for all of my intricate and foolproof plans and backup plans that I knew I’d definitely carry out with the cool-headedness of a trained assassin, I do not react as planned or backup planned. Instead I stare at her like Donald Trump stared at that solar eclipse: I blink twice, dry heave, turn ninety degrees to the left, and absolutely haul ass out of there. I’m dodging trees, because my contact lenses are dried out from sleeping in them, so I can’t see. I’m trying to wipe that weird goop—the stuff that oozes out and glues your eyes together while you sleep—off my eyelashes when I think I see someone brush against my right side, like a cat trying to get my attention, but when I look, there’s no one. I skid to a stop, squinting into the trees, trying to figure out where I am. I have to blink several times to verify that I’m still alone. Sometimes I swear I can see the version of Michelle that lives inside my head and exists to taunt me. She’s so good at being almost real. Damn, Savage, Michelle says. You finally did it. “What?” I’m not supposed to talk to her. It’s a compulsion. And it only makes her worse. I don’t look at her, though—that’s gotta count for something. Buy the Book Decomposition Book Sara van Os Buy Book Decomposition Book Sara van Os Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Finally found a body! Michelle says with a smile. Fuck, I looked. It’s okay. I just won’t say anything else to her. She isn’t real. She isn’t real. I look around. I can’t see the edge of the trees from here. That means I’m going the wrong way. Okay. Backward. I turn and start to walk back toward the body, trying not to think of it as “toward the body.” Don’t you remember? That summer of sixth grade when your mom was really big on the true crime documentaries and you got all obsessed with death. You wanted to find a body so you could see what it was like to be dead. So we looked. We climbed that big, brushy hill in front of your old house and started looking behind trees and under bushes, hoping at the very least we’d find someone’s severed arm or something. Michelle continues on, pulling the memory up from deep in my mind like she’s pulling a loose thread from a sweater. She projects it up on the inner wall of my brain for me to see. It’s true. We did look. I don’t know why; I just found being dead fascinating and I didn’t love its certainty. I thought seeing it would help me prepare for the thing that was coming for me, too. I stare hard at the ground to stop myself from unraveling. I need to focus on getting back. I know where the clearing with the body is relative to my house. I used to take a lot of walks out here when I was younger, and that clearing is the only real break in the trees I’ve ever found. The rest of the forest is super dense, so I used to stop at that clearing and chill. I found the spot to be peaceful, probably why I went there last night in the first place. My stomach tightens as I get close. I’m nervous. I remind myself that I’m not going back to gawk at the body; I’m only trying to get home. So? How was it? The more I try to ignore her, the louder Michelle speaks. Are you fascinated? Is that why your heart’s beating faster right now—because you’re excited to go back and poke her with a stick? I can hear it from here. I stop walking and close my eyes, hoping that when I open them, she’ll be gone. I try to breathe slower and regulate my heart rate. I count my heartbeats. Too many of them, too fast. I push on my sternum with my palm to try to make it stop. I worry my heart will burst and then there will be two corpses out here. Behind my eyelids is an image of myself poking the body in the stomach with a stick. I push too hard and it pops and something green and sludgy oozes out. I shake my head back and forth, hoping to clear the image like an Etch A Sketch. The me in my head pushes the stick even deeper and twists. I open my eyes, panting, and there’s Michelle again, laughing at me. Jesus, you’re sick. Always have been, though, clearly. I drop my hand to my side and start walking again, faster, fists balled, denting my palms with my nails. It starts to look brighter up ahead, where the trees open up. I slow down until I’ve stopped. The tree just in front of me is the tree that she’s behind. When I inch to the right and look down, I can see her half her hand, peeking out from the end of a raggedy sleeve, fingers curled into a stiff cup. It still looks so much like a living hand, but there’s something uncanny about it that gives me the ick. But I can’t look away; I don’t breathe. This is what I will become. A statue of flesh. An almost person. How do you think she died? Michelle asks, snapping me out of it so abruptly that I jump with a squeak—I’m almost glad the woman on the ground isn’t alive to hear it. I force my cement feet forward, straight past the body, refusing to turn around and look back at her, trying to stay ahead of Michelle, but Michelle moves alongside me with ease. The body doesn’t bother her. Meanwhile, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s staring at me. I mean, Michelle continues, it’s not like people just drop dead around here. How’d she even get here, anyway? You don’t have neighbors. The nearest house is, what? A mile away? Two? “She could be homeless,” I mutter, and then scold myself for answering. I count my breaths in sets of two. I take two steps for every breath. I just need to get home. Michelle huffs. Homeless? Around here? Babe, that’s like being homeless in the Hamptons. It’s not really done. One, two. One, two. She’s not real. She’s not real. She was probably murdered. That’s the only way a corpse ever really ends up in the woods. And if she was murdered, you know what that means? I do not want to know what that means, but Michelle tells me anyway. That means either some crazed killer decided to dump the body here in the middle of the night even though he would have had to drive right up your driveway and past your house to get here, and then drag her through the woods and dump her against that tree even though he for sure knows you live here and will likely find his kill OR—she pauses for dramatic effect—you killed her. I skid to a stop. “Me?” Excerpted from Decomposition Book by Sara Van Os. © 2026 by Sara Van Os, used with permission from Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Decomposition Book</i> by Sara van Os appeared first on Reactor.