Better by Far: A Novel

Of her debut Out of Love, Hazel Hayes said, ''The journey from writing horror to writing love stories was a short one. There is nothing more horrific than love.'' In her second novel, she sets out to prove it. Following a breakup, Kate and her now ex-boyfriend Finn decide to continue sharing their apartment until the lease runs out in twelve weeks. They will alternate living there week by week so that they are sharing the same space, but never at the same time. Practically, the plan makes sense, but coming back each Sunday to a home where Finn has been and gone, finding traces of him there, feels too much like living with a ghost. Having lost her mother at a young age, this fresh grief pushes unhealed sorrows to the surface, and Kate finds herself sinking further into increasingly macabre dreams, which begin to soak through the veil of sleep into her waking world. All the while, Kate is trying to write her second novel, but she finds herself instead writing to Finn. Spilling all her thoughts and fears onto the page, she tells him the things she knows he''ll never hear. Around her, life carries on as usual, but Kate feels caught in a threshold between lives, floating between her past and present, suspended in the air, having let go of one thing but not yet grabbed onto the next.