Killing Stella

Left alone for the weekend while her husband and two children are visiting her in-laws, the narrator of Killing Stella recounts the addition of her friend’s daughter, Stella, into their already tense and tumultuous household. Staring out the window at her garden, she worries about the baby bird in the linden tree, about her husband, Richard, who flits from one adulterous affair to an other, about her son’s gloomy demeanor and her daughter’s obliviousness to everything, and, most of all, she worries about Stella, a confused teenager who has just met a sudden and disastrous end.

A domestic horror story that builds to an apocalyptic ending, Killing Stella distills many of the themes of Marlen Haushofer’s acclaimed novel The Wall into a claustrophobic, gothic, shattering novella.