The unnamed 40-something narrator of Melissa Broder’s latest novel, Death Valley, is running away. A novelist, she leaves her dysfunctional life in Los Angeles and heads to the California desert, where she hides out at her favorite hotel, the Best Western. She’s attempting to escape the two men who grant her meaning but also send her into massive bouts of existential despair: her ailing father and her sickly husband.

The father, who was critically injured in a car crash and is now suffering from pneumonia, barely clings to life; the husband, afflicted by a mysterious illness, is mostly bedridden and has “debilitating fatigue. Stomach cramps and diarrhea. The inability to walk more than a block.” The narrator, burdened by anxiety and depression, is far worse off than the physically sick men in her life, and the novel follows her as she tries to get herself in psychological order, with the help of some magic. Broder, as she does in all her work, unabashedly leans into her narrator’s neuroses, getting awfully close to tipping into the melodramatic.