I’ll fully preface this post by saying that this story was entirely baffling to read, and I think it also goes without saying that it being strange to read was the point of it. The whole notion of the story was unsettling, kids having to kill, strange ideas of not being from this planet, and how detached the girl was from everything around her was deeply weird. I’m trying to think of any other way to describe this story, but weird really is the best word for it; sinister would be the only other way to describe it in my mind. The very last line of the entire book on p. 294 was: “I wait for the bad man to let me in.” The level of uncertainty that leaving the story off on that note was crazy to me. We can figure that the girl probably is just human, but who knows considering how Moshfegh wrote the whole story? To pull something like this girl legitimately being from another world sounds like something right up her writing style’s alley. Not only that, but the mother clearly wants her kids to stay away from this man’s house, so I whenever I was reading this I got the sense that the girl was probably going to get killed- or worse.
Though, in a way, the way that this story blows all of her other stories out of the water with its strangeness put the whole book into perspective. In all of the stories there’s this grittiness, this underlying disgusting nature that left me feeling conflicted about whether I enjoyed the story. It made me wonder whether I even should have enjoyed the stories, and “A Better Place” really just put a magnifying glass on those feelings for me. It was definitely a different experience, most authors like to leave their readers off on at least a quasi-hopeful note; I know I already talked about the last line, but it really is a horrific thought to leave the reader on. Someone’s probably going to die, either the narrator or the man, and it also leaves the question of what will happen to her brother as well. It’s a morbid and somber final hoorah, and it makes me wonder what Otessa Moshfegh wanted her readers to get out of the book at all. Were we supposed to be repulsed by humanity, find solace in any solidarity we found, feel relief in comradery with our darkest thoughts, worry about our own aptitudes for awfulness, or- what? It left me with a lot of questions, which may have also been the point.
I agree with your statement that the tension and uncertainty at the end of this story is a little horrific. We don’t know what will happen to the narrator though we suspect that she will die; the story is in present tense so we can’t know. I think the age of the narrator and her intentions are also a factor into the horridness of it all–after all, children are supposed to be innocent. One of the hallmarks of Ottessa’s writing is that she stops the story before the action which is an interesting writing choice. It does leave the reader in a tangled state, but I believe that is in line with the characters of her narrators, and it does as you say, leave us with a lot of questions.