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by Susan Barker
The Historian meets Under the Skin in this searingly provocative literary horror novel about one woman's determination to stay alive at any terrifying cost.
In Osaka, two strangers, Jake and Mariko, miss a flight, and over dinner, discover they've both brutally lost loved ones whose paths crossed with the same beguiling woman no one has seen since.
Following traces this mysterious person left behind, Jake travels from country to country gathering chilling testimonies from others who encountered her across the decades—a trail of shattered souls that eventually leads him to Theo, a dying sculptor in rural New Mexico, who knows the woman better than anyone—and might just hold the key to who, or what, she is.
Part horror, part western, part thriller, Old Soul is a fearlessly bold and genre-defying tale about predation, morality and free will, and one man's quest to bring a centuries-long chain of human devastation to an end.
"[A] sweeping work of literary horror ... The slow-burning tension and lush, atmospheric prose build a creeping sense of dread that lingers long after the final page. Fans of both the deeply personal speculative horror of Carmen Maria Machado and the subtle, character-driven mystery of Haruki Murakami will be enthralled." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The worldbuilding is rickety and kind of cringe. It turns out that the more you explain a terrible entity beyond human comprehension, the less terrible it gets. Similarly, the villain's backstory makes her less, rather than more, frightening. An ungainly novel that undermines the promise of its premise." —Kirkus Reviews
"Delicious, disturbing WTF-ery... [A] singular reading experience you need to have for yourself... Incendiary literary horror... My idea of a perfect novel, one that is so compelling and criminally well-written that you can't put it down, and also weird and fucked up in a way that feels like it's ruining your life, but in the best way. I can't stop thinking about it, especially the ending. I think I'll go read it again right now." —Book Riot
"Susan Barker's Old Soul beguiles, terrifies, and utterly seduces you as swiftly and slyly as the mysterious woman at its center. It's at once a thriller, a postmodern mystery, and an existential horror tale, but perhaps most deeply it speaks to our current moment: the drift and terrors of loneliness, the risks of intimacy and a piercing nostalgia that never lets us go." —Megan Abbott, author of El Dorado Drive
"Old Soul is perfect read for the chilly depths of winter: a clever, spooky metaphysical mystery that spans continents—and even planets. Susan Barker's novel kept me guessing until the end. You'll never look at Venus quite the same way again." —Chloe Benjamin, author of The Immortalists
"Old Soul is like nothing else I've ever read…I loved how it made me feel: like I'd woken up after a long sleep to see for the first time how terrifying and strange the contemporary world has become. This is 21st century horror: the kind of story you tell around a campfire as the lights of civilization begin flicker out around you; a global, intelligent, and ambitious archetypal nightmare." —Kristen Roupenian, author of You Know You Want This
This information about Old Soul was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Derek Anson
Susan Barker is the author of Sayonara Bar and The Orientalist and the Ghost, both longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. She grew up in East London with a Chinese-Malyasian mother and a British father, and studied creative writing at the University of Manchester. She spent several years living in Beijing while working on The Incarnations, and currently lives in the UK.
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