Now, this book contains not just the dead Wolf may know of and that Mrs Death may mention, but the names each of you may want to remember here today. And in thefuture anyone who reads your copy of this book will read that handwritten name and speak it aloud.

Mrs Death Misses Death may on the surface be a book about loss and endings but it is also a brave and funny view of living, and the space between the two. There is life here, and humour, and a challenging viewpoint. The book is filled with strong female and non-binary characters, grappling with the sheer exhaustion of holding their shit together and coping with the shape of the world. All the warmth and all the joy is boiled in a soup of memory, we stir the good stuff from the bottom of the pot and hold the ladle up, drink, we say, look at all the good chunks of goodness, take in your share of good times, good music, good books, good food, good laughter, good people, be grateful for the good stuff, life and death, we say, drink. One of my absolute favorite characteristics in books is WEIRDNESS. I’m exactly the target audience for experimental storytelling. The premise sounded awesome, but the execution just fell so short. The weirdness felt so surface level. It gave the book this Fake-Deep feel. And let’s hope that if you do kill yourself, you are well over forty years old, because to kill yourself before age forty is like murdering a stranger.

Finding Your Story

Let's start with a couple things: this is not a novel, story or even really a narrative of any kind. Second, I skimmed the last half hoping for some semblance of an "ah-ha, I get it" moment; but sadly it never materialized. Wolf is not the most reliable narrator. They are haunted by the death of their mother. That death hangs over the entire novel; it makes Wolf susceptible to long stretches of severe depression. Wolf’s quiet meandering around London, which is alive with ghosts, reflects their fragile mental state. So as it might seem obvious, I was expecting fantasy but don't let the premise fool you, this book is full of surprises, twists, and turns. It is also an interesting combination of fiction and poetry. Mrs Death’s memoir is collated by Wolf Willeford, a young poet living in the attic rooms of the Forest Tavern in East London. The two first met when Wolf was a child, having lost their mother in a fire, and are a perfect balance to tell this tale. “Wolf’s very magical,” Godden notes. “Wolf in a way is close to death – Wolf is troubled and perhaps suicidal, and that to me felt the perfect friend to death, that kind of young, troubled, lonely lost soul who’s known a lot of tragedy.”

I am here. Death is a woman. I am a woman. Surely by erasing me we have erased this power? By never portraying a woman as the representative of Death, the boss of Death, the figure of Death itself, one could debate that an important and fundamental disempowerment takes place. Perhaps this is what erasure looks like.

The Premise: I can say I have never read a premise like this. Death herself gets someone to write a memoir about her life. INJECT THIS IN MY VEINS! I mean seriously, how utterly original is this premise. It’s the idea of when you’re not speaking your truth, and not saying something you really want to say,” she explains. “When you keep putting something off, you berate yourself and put yourself down for not getting something finished. It’s easy to have a really good idea, it’s difficult to finish something, isn’t it? So to pursue it, and to persist in finishing it, hurt, but it hurt a hell of a lot more giving up.” Acquiring an antique desk – a gregarious character in its own right that Salena pictures as having the voice of RuPaul (“I could have been a piano!”) – becomes a conduit for the duo’s journey, where they navigate death across the eras, sharing tales and memories. Timelessness is captured through a mix of prose and poetry – laments and lullabies, prayers, snatches of memory sitting between the veil of dream and real life. The story sits in a dreamlike state, flowing prose interrupted by transmissions of people’s last thoughts. A previous chapter “Mrs Death: I know a Lot of Dead People Now” which philosophises that knowledge and recognition of the inevitability of death (not just yours but the death of all your family and friends) is vital for life, is both mirrored and countered in a final prose section “Wolf: The Tower” where Wolf encounters Life who says that living your own life fully for the moment and in the knowledge of the life of all your friends and family is what life is really about.

But Mrs Death has reached exhaustion and saturation – despite all the technology and communication available to mankind what she and her lover Time and sister Life had expected to be a quiet 21st Century, instead she has to control her sister’s Life fecundity and also deal with greater than ever untimely death “war and deconstruction, famine and murder”.The Gordon Burn Prize recognises literature that is forward-thinking and fearless in its ambition and execution, often playing with style, pushing boundaries, crossing genres or challenging readers’ expectations. These are the collected memoirs of Mrs Death, edited and compiled by me, Wolf Willeford. I’m a poet and I live in the attic rooms of the Forest Tavern in East London. Contained here are some of Mrs Death’s private diary entries, some stories, poems and pieces of conversations I have had with Mrs Death; she who is Death, the woman who is the boss at the end of all of us. I share this hoping that it is the beginning of your own conversation with yourself and with your own precious time here. Mrs Death Misses Death is a short novel, but is moving, and at times, difficult to read due to the subject matter.

She is nobody and she is everybody. She is the homeless person begging for change outside the train station. Mrs Death is the spirit of the ignored and the saint of the betrayed. She is the first woman. Mrs Death is the first mother of all mothers. She is calling to us all now. She is weeping. She is cradling her crumbling world. She is holding this toxic and wounded planet to her cold breast. She is sitting next to you on the bus. She is amongst us. I got it wrong. Mrs Death is not the wife of Death. No. And she is not the mother of Death. No. She is Death, and she gets the final say. Salena Godden has written a story that demands and deserves to be heard. Hypnotic and beautiful, tender and sad, Mrs Death Misses Death brings me life. In a time where death is at the forefront, it’s rare to find a book that so thoroughly reminds us about the joys of life, the fragments of memories that last a lifetime, rooting out what really matters. “Even though it’s got death in the title, it’s a book about life – it’s about living life,” says Godden. “It’s about telling people you love them before it’s too late. It’s not really about death, which death often isn’t. So much of this book is about facing your fear, and how empowering it is to see fear for what it is, to see doubt, and to find courage, to find hope.I am seldom so enraged by a book that I feel the need to write a scathing review, but this book has done it. In one fell swoop, it has achieved the coveted status as being one of the worst pieces of writing I have ever had the misfortune of reading. Honestly, it felt like it was written by a disturbed group of Year 8 drama students trying to impress their classmates by making relentless reference to death and how miserable and gloomy it is. This, the debut novel by poet and performance artist Salena Godden (see here for perhaps her best known work Red- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My85d...) certainly fits that billing.