I finished 2025 with Lisa Tuttle’s My Death, and, my god, what what a way to go out.

This taut, uncanny novella is difficult to categorize, even more difficult to summarize. At just over 100 pages, My Death managed to truly surprise me. I could have lived in this story longer, but I also feel satisfied (and confused and disturbed and in awe).

In short, this novella is about an unnamed woman writer, an American expat living in Scotland in the early 2000s. She recently lost her husband and has writer’s block, and her agent is pushing her to come up with a new project. After seeing a painting of young woman in the National Gallery that she loved in her youth, she learns the subject was one of her favorite writers — a somewhat forgotten modernist, known in niche circles. And she is still alive! Our unnamed protagonist decides to find her and write a biography about her.

From there, the story gets stranger and stranger, with dreams (or rather, nightmares) and flashbacks, odd coincidences and unsettling moments. The final twist at the very end is one I will never forget!

I didn’t know much about Lisa Tuttle before reading this book. She’s better known in the U.K. than here in the U.S., and she mostly writes speculative fiction and horror. She’s originally from Houston and spent the 70s in Austin, where she connected with the city’s then-lively SF scene. She hung out writers like George R. R. Martina and Bruce Sterling, back in the Armadillo World Headquarter, Cosmic Cowboy days. (That’s a book I’d read!) I’m a little ashamed to have missed her work given her feminist oeuvre and local connection. But thanks to a recommendation from a colleague, I have discovered her now.

Also, this edition is a recent reprint from the New York Review of Books. I love these NYRB editions. They’re beautifully made, and any time I read one, it’s usually an author I never would have found otherwise. I picked this one up at Alienated Majesty, one of my favorite local bookstores.