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Tell Me I’m Worthless
Three years ago, Alice spent one night in an abandoned house with her friends, Ila and Hannah. Since then, Alice’s life has spiraled. She lives a haunted existence, selling videos of herself for money, going to parties she hates, drinking herself to sleep.
Memories of that night torment Alice, but when Ila asks her to return to the House, to go past the KEEP OUT sign and over the sick earth where teenagers dare each other to venture, Alice knows she must go.
Together, Alice and Ila must face the horrors that happened there, must pull themselves apart from the inside out, put their differences aside, and try to rescue Hannah, whom the House has chosen to make its own.
Memories of that night torment Alice, but when Ila asks her to return to the House, to go past the KEEP OUT sign and over the sick earth where teenagers dare each other to venture, Alice knows she must go.
Together, Alice and Ila must face the horrors that happened there, must pull themselves apart from the inside out, put their differences aside, and try to rescue Hannah, whom the House has chosen to make its own.
264 pages, Paperback
First published October 28, 2021
About the author
Alison Rumfitt
7 books954 followersAlison Rumfitt is a woman in trouble.
She lives and works in Brighton, and writes deeply personal, transgressive horror.
She lives and works in Brighton, and writes deeply personal, transgressive horror.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,568 reviews
June 21, 2024
‘Ghosts are born from trauma and violence.’
I relish the rare moments when a book can completely annihilate you. Tell Me I’m Worthless, the debut novel by promising young writer Alison Rumfitt, is a horror novel that not only has teeth but an intelligence and power to tear you to pieces and put you back together in a way that leaves you forever haunted, and glad for it. Seriously, this book is intense and while the content warning that precedes her grisly tale lets you know what you are in for, nothing can truly prepare you for how unsettling this is in the way it forces you to confront the violent and pervasive ideologies of fascism as it slimes its way through modern society. Drawing on a long history of horror and fairy tale literature, Rumfitt delivers a razor-sharp and very political haunted house narrative that explores issues of trauma and the trans experience under creeping fascism. The novel rotates between perspectives of Alice, a trans woman, and Ila (with an intentional choice to mirror their names), her former girlfriend that is now a public figure for trans exclusionary radical feminists, and the voice of the House itself, as the two women deal with the aftermath of them having entered the house years ago with their friend Hannah. Only the two of them walked out, both with conflicting memories of abuse from the other that occurred during their stay, and are forever traumatized and haunted by both figurative and literal ghosts. Tell Me I’m Worthless is an unrelenting horror festival that boldly pulls the reader through the hell of modern discourse and violent ideologies to explore the real-life horrors of queer life in the UK.
‘Where were you when we lost the culture war?’
This book is a lot, and I’m completely blown away by it. Alison Rumfitt, a trans woman, has delivered a harrowing narrative on the trans experience that hits with a truly astonishing force and is a perfect example why we need inclusivity in publishing to tell a more encompassing range of stories. While Tell Me I’m Worthless draws on horror and fairy tale fiction influences complete with homages to Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Helen Oyeyemi, books including Jamaica Inn or Jane Eyre, as well as allusions to pioneers of literature on gender and race such as Audre Lorde, there is still a thrilling uniqueness to the novel that feels it couldn’t—and maybe shouldn’t—have been created by anyone but Rumfitt herself. The inspirations and occasional pastiche that occur are very welcomed, and Rumfitt has a reading list that I simply adore (it helps that with each reference I caught I thought, “I love that book too!”). The Haunting of Hill House is a clear inspiration and model for much of the book, and lovingly so. Look at one of Rumfitt’s descriptions of the House:
It is a wonderful reimagining of the imagery and ideas expressed by Jackson and her notable opening paragraph to Hill House:
It feels less like a clever remake and more like passing the torch, continuing the tradition of psychological horror to battle the demons of the present with the support of those who came before. The whole book reads as very personal to Rumfitt and of-the-moment in a way that truly shines, with Rumfitt admitting it is build from a space of being ‘quite tuned into discourse, in a way that can be bad for my own health,’ and, written during the pandemic lockdowns, was constantly informed and updated to address the ever changing arguments that flood social media with each news cycle. It is effective and the language of the novel crackles in the tongue of modern internet discourse, twisted and imperfect as hot takes and viral twitter threads and soiled with the rhetorical maggots that lay their eggs and thrive in the damp and dark of 4chan anonymity. Tell Me I’m Worthless feels destined to become a cult classic as it truly captures uneasy existence as violent ideologies are given space and taken seriously in the general public while violence against trans people is so prevalent it has been declared an epidemic Or, perhaps, in ten years we may look back on it as outdated and not in line with a more inclusive present. This would be preferable, and the book argues for a future such as this.
‘The fascists are already here…’
As stated in the content warning, Tell Me I’m Worthless focuses on ‘trauma and fascism.’ This book is triggering in very many ways, dealing with sexual assault, transphobia, antisemitism, and racism among others, and it should be kept in mind they are used for more than mere discomfort for the horror genre and to make a very loud statement against them. Be warned though, this book is intensely graphic and uses a lot of language and explanation of ideas that are extremely uncomfortable (though very effective). Nothing is very subtle here either, with the house being very obviously a metaphor for how fascism can infect through entry points of fear, feelings of inadequacy, thirsts for power and more. However, there is no need for subtleties here, with bold choices such as the house being named Albion (a word that is used to name the island of Great Britain) and the directness of the book gives it a rather punk flair that works particularly well with the horror aesthetics. While Rumfitt avoids directly naming him, one of the ghosts that haunts Alice is the musician Morrissey—who’s political statements of late have more or less made him the older generation’s J.K. Rowling but for music—who appears eyeless out of her torn The Smiths poster she keeps up to cover a frightening looking stain on her wall. The effect is both comical and utterly terrifying to read, with Rumfitt being astonishingly good at creating very visual scenes full of terror, and this combination of horror and dark humor really drives the enjoyment of this book. This book is punk as fuck, as the saying goes.
This book is set in our present, where LGBTQ+ issues have gained visibility but also continue to have a frightening and often violent backlash. ‘Notable reversals have appeared in nations overtaken by right-wing populism,’ Jules Joanne Gleeson writes in an introduction to a collection of essays on the intersections of politics and trans culture, and in her interview for the Guardian between her and gender-studies philosopher Judith Butler, Butler (most notably in an answer that was removed hours after initial publication despite pushback from Gleeson) notes the large overlap between trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and neo-fascism, claiming an anti-trans ‘ ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times.’ The TERF ideology is prevalent through the novel, as Ila is an active member of an anti-trans organization and frequent contributor of essays and interviews on the subject. These passages may be difficult to read and much of the book makes the reader confront the rhetoric of anti-trans arguments. In an interview with Pink News (highly recommended read), Rumfitt explains that the narration from Ila was written for ‘ getting into the headspace of someone who, if they met me on the street, would probably hate me… it’s so much a part of modern discourse in this country that it’s kind of strange that it’s gone so unexplored.’ As she is someone who has undoubtedly heard these arguments far too often and made to feel unsafe because of them, Rumfitt delivers a very disturbing exploration.
What makes Tell Me I’m Worthless so effective is how well it captures the nuance of modern discourse that is often swept aside out of inconvenience to get the best hot take. The nature of social media also positions people against each other, where the best spicy quip is often more valued than discourse. We exist in a world where access to information and theory is right at our fingertips, but there is still the difficulty in navigating and rationalizing it all. Activist Emma Dabiri discusses the difference between information and knowledge in this regard, and how the latter requires much more experience and cerebral undertakings to effectively utilize. Which is also Rumfitt’s point in presenting some of the more toxic ideologies and then framing them in complex and intricate scenarios almost as a test to see if you will succumb to the voice of the House as so many others do. The book borrows language and imagery from fascist political figures like Pinochet and Mussolini, or drawing from fear-mongering speeches like the ”rivers of blood” speech by Enoch Powell to demonstrate how persuasive they can be, particularly under extreme circumstances or while bathed in fear. While the growing fascism examined in the book is particularly framed as it occurs in the UK, the darkness of it is universal to anyone who has encountered far-right authoritarians in their many forms.
‘You, too, are implicated in its presence. Don’t forget that. You, me. Those you love.’
The House itself is written as a root of these ideas, spreading them throughout the land as well as claiming victims for itself in a way that feels like a more subtle version of the monster that infects the citizens of New York City with racism in The City We Became by the wonderful N.K. Jemisin. The House reminds us of our complicity in the society we exist within and that our systems and structures can be rotted at the core, creating a systemic violence or oppression that thrives on our denial of them. The effect here is that while people might not be knowingly fascist, it shows how they become willing to accept fascist rhetoric and arguments into their minds, which then festers and grows within them like vines slowly strangling out their empathy and humanity.
Presenting this topic through the genre of horror is brilliant, keeping fear and safety a central topic in the novel. ‘For someone to feel safe, another has to be safe,’ the House preaches, ‘for someone, the majority, to prosper, another has to… well. I think you understand…’ The book places the characters in that unsettled, deflated feeling of being post-college and wallowing while waiting to land somewhere, making them all the more susceptible in their unease, and we watch as they are losing a battle of becoming a product of their traumas rather than one they wish to be. Only by returning to the House and confronting them can they ever move forward in life. In the present, Hannah is absent, the friend who ‘always ended being the odd one out, the third wheel,’ which made her the perfect victim for the House where she may or may not be either trapped inside or have fallen victim to the horrors she endured.
‘We were young and idealistic,’ they think of when they braved the House the first time, ‘ we wanted to make some political point of the whole thing.’ The political is always present in this book, but beyond topics of gender Tell Me I’m Worthless also tackles social class head on. Immigration, Brexit, crime, and more are all public conversation, one political ideologues capitalize on for power and profit, and the House is a well-constructed metaphor of these. ‘The most famous haunted places in the world tend to be the big houses and castles,’ Rumfitt writes, ‘because rich people lived in them and the collective blood on their hands, the collective violence that they caused on everyone else in the world, manifests into ghosts.’ Albion, the House and the nation, are examined as the product of years and years of bloodshed, colonialism, racial oppression, patriarchy and more amalgamating into a dark force that transcends the physical world. The reaches of the House occur in every corner of society, even property ownership that leads to pushing out the unhoused and anyone deemed an Other. An effective image occurs early in the book of an abandoned church with ‘a sign outside reading TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. God’s body, decaying, has now been cut off from society; do not touch him, for he is owned by a variety of contractors, and they have legal power over the likes of you.’
Tell Me I’m Worthless is an unflinching and brutally direct novel that combines horror with political and social discourse to deliver a fantastically unsettling story. Alison Rumfitt has taken the reigns from her predecessors and driven the genre of horror and fairy tales deep into the heart of our modern condition, constructing amazing imagery that thrills as much as it chills. Rumfitt has crafted a stunning debut here. This is certainly not for everyone, and I will caution that this book can be quite triggering, but if you dare to enter this book will have its ghosts following you forevermore.
5/5
‘Sometimes, at the end of everything, the only option you have is to make it worse.’
I relish the rare moments when a book can completely annihilate you. Tell Me I’m Worthless, the debut novel by promising young writer Alison Rumfitt, is a horror novel that not only has teeth but an intelligence and power to tear you to pieces and put you back together in a way that leaves you forever haunted, and glad for it. Seriously, this book is intense and while the content warning that precedes her grisly tale lets you know what you are in for, nothing can truly prepare you for how unsettling this is in the way it forces you to confront the violent and pervasive ideologies of fascism as it slimes its way through modern society. Drawing on a long history of horror and fairy tale literature, Rumfitt delivers a razor-sharp and very political haunted house narrative that explores issues of trauma and the trans experience under creeping fascism. The novel rotates between perspectives of Alice, a trans woman, and Ila (with an intentional choice to mirror their names), her former girlfriend that is now a public figure for trans exclusionary radical feminists, and the voice of the House itself, as the two women deal with the aftermath of them having entered the house years ago with their friend Hannah. Only the two of them walked out, both with conflicting memories of abuse from the other that occurred during their stay, and are forever traumatized and haunted by both figurative and literal ghosts. Tell Me I’m Worthless is an unrelenting horror festival that boldly pulls the reader through the hell of modern discourse and violent ideologies to explore the real-life horrors of queer life in the UK.
‘Where were you when we lost the culture war?’
This book is a lot, and I’m completely blown away by it. Alison Rumfitt, a trans woman, has delivered a harrowing narrative on the trans experience that hits with a truly astonishing force and is a perfect example why we need inclusivity in publishing to tell a more encompassing range of stories. While Tell Me I’m Worthless draws on horror and fairy tale fiction influences complete with homages to Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Helen Oyeyemi, books including Jamaica Inn or Jane Eyre, as well as allusions to pioneers of literature on gender and race such as Audre Lorde, there is still a thrilling uniqueness to the novel that feels it couldn’t—and maybe shouldn’t—have been created by anyone but Rumfitt herself. The inspirations and occasional pastiche that occur are very welcomed, and Rumfitt has a reading list that I simply adore (it helps that with each reference I caught I thought, “I love that book too!”). The Haunting of Hill House is a clear inspiration and model for much of the book, and lovingly so. Look at one of Rumfitt’s descriptions of the House:
’ No live organism can continue to exist compassionately under conditions of absolute fascism, even the birds in Italy under Mussolini were observed to take part in rallies and violence. Albion, not compassionate, not sane, stood ringed by a tangled forest, holding inside, however messily, its overpowering ideology; it had stood so for a hundred years but would only stand for one more before it entered into the long process of becoming something else, at the end of which it was hoped it would seem to all the world that it had always been that way. Within, floors crumbled, ceilings gaped open, vines choked the chimneys and the windows. Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of the house, and whatever walked there marched on Rome.’
It is a wonderful reimagining of the imagery and ideas expressed by Jackson and her notable opening paragraph to Hill House:
‘ No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.’
It feels less like a clever remake and more like passing the torch, continuing the tradition of psychological horror to battle the demons of the present with the support of those who came before. The whole book reads as very personal to Rumfitt and of-the-moment in a way that truly shines, with Rumfitt admitting it is build from a space of being ‘quite tuned into discourse, in a way that can be bad for my own health,’ and, written during the pandemic lockdowns, was constantly informed and updated to address the ever changing arguments that flood social media with each news cycle. It is effective and the language of the novel crackles in the tongue of modern internet discourse, twisted and imperfect as hot takes and viral twitter threads and soiled with the rhetorical maggots that lay their eggs and thrive in the damp and dark of 4chan anonymity. Tell Me I’m Worthless feels destined to become a cult classic as it truly captures uneasy existence as violent ideologies are given space and taken seriously in the general public while violence against trans people is so prevalent it has been declared an epidemic Or, perhaps, in ten years we may look back on it as outdated and not in line with a more inclusive present. This would be preferable, and the book argues for a future such as this.
‘The fascists are already here…’
As stated in the content warning, Tell Me I’m Worthless focuses on ‘trauma and fascism.’ This book is triggering in very many ways, dealing with sexual assault, transphobia, antisemitism, and racism among others, and it should be kept in mind they are used for more than mere discomfort for the horror genre and to make a very loud statement against them. Be warned though, this book is intensely graphic and uses a lot of language and explanation of ideas that are extremely uncomfortable (though very effective). Nothing is very subtle here either, with the house being very obviously a metaphor for how fascism can infect through entry points of fear, feelings of inadequacy, thirsts for power and more. However, there is no need for subtleties here, with bold choices such as the house being named Albion (a word that is used to name the island of Great Britain) and the directness of the book gives it a rather punk flair that works particularly well with the horror aesthetics. While Rumfitt avoids directly naming him, one of the ghosts that haunts Alice is the musician Morrissey—who’s political statements of late have more or less made him the older generation’s J.K. Rowling but for music—who appears eyeless out of her torn The Smiths poster she keeps up to cover a frightening looking stain on her wall. The effect is both comical and utterly terrifying to read, with Rumfitt being astonishingly good at creating very visual scenes full of terror, and this combination of horror and dark humor really drives the enjoyment of this book. This book is punk as fuck, as the saying goes.
This book is set in our present, where LGBTQ+ issues have gained visibility but also continue to have a frightening and often violent backlash. ‘Notable reversals have appeared in nations overtaken by right-wing populism,’ Jules Joanne Gleeson writes in an introduction to a collection of essays on the intersections of politics and trans culture, and in her interview for the Guardian between her and gender-studies philosopher Judith Butler, Butler (most notably in an answer that was removed hours after initial publication despite pushback from Gleeson) notes the large overlap between trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and neo-fascism, claiming an anti-trans ‘ ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times.’ The TERF ideology is prevalent through the novel, as Ila is an active member of an anti-trans organization and frequent contributor of essays and interviews on the subject. These passages may be difficult to read and much of the book makes the reader confront the rhetoric of anti-trans arguments. In an interview with Pink News (highly recommended read), Rumfitt explains that the narration from Ila was written for ‘ getting into the headspace of someone who, if they met me on the street, would probably hate me… it’s so much a part of modern discourse in this country that it’s kind of strange that it’s gone so unexplored.’ As she is someone who has undoubtedly heard these arguments far too often and made to feel unsafe because of them, Rumfitt delivers a very disturbing exploration.
‘ Now, if three girls enter a house and only two leave, who is to blame? And if both girls tell a different story, but you read online that you have to BELIEVE WOMEN, what do you? Do you decide one is a woman and one isn't, so you can believe one them but not the other? Do you take the side of the woman who is most like you? Or the most intersectional one? But one is rich, and white, and trans, and the other is rich, and Asian and a lesbian, and cis (?), and fuck, who wins here? In the end it's so hard to choose where your sympathies settle. So, you go online and find an `intersectionality score calculator' on the internet…Numbers have been known to lie. Numbers have been known to show bias, statistics often have racist undertones, for example.
So, there's just two girls leaving a house and maybe you don't have to take a side, maybe you can empathize with them both and hope they get the therapy and help they need and can learn to forgive one another. No. You can't do that.'
What makes Tell Me I’m Worthless so effective is how well it captures the nuance of modern discourse that is often swept aside out of inconvenience to get the best hot take. The nature of social media also positions people against each other, where the best spicy quip is often more valued than discourse. We exist in a world where access to information and theory is right at our fingertips, but there is still the difficulty in navigating and rationalizing it all. Activist Emma Dabiri discusses the difference between information and knowledge in this regard, and how the latter requires much more experience and cerebral undertakings to effectively utilize. Which is also Rumfitt’s point in presenting some of the more toxic ideologies and then framing them in complex and intricate scenarios almost as a test to see if you will succumb to the voice of the House as so many others do. The book borrows language and imagery from fascist political figures like Pinochet and Mussolini, or drawing from fear-mongering speeches like the ”rivers of blood” speech by Enoch Powell to demonstrate how persuasive they can be, particularly under extreme circumstances or while bathed in fear. While the growing fascism examined in the book is particularly framed as it occurs in the UK, the darkness of it is universal to anyone who has encountered far-right authoritarians in their many forms.
‘You, too, are implicated in its presence. Don’t forget that. You, me. Those you love.’
The House itself is written as a root of these ideas, spreading them throughout the land as well as claiming victims for itself in a way that feels like a more subtle version of the monster that infects the citizens of New York City with racism in The City We Became by the wonderful N.K. Jemisin. The House reminds us of our complicity in the society we exist within and that our systems and structures can be rotted at the core, creating a systemic violence or oppression that thrives on our denial of them. The effect here is that while people might not be knowingly fascist, it shows how they become willing to accept fascist rhetoric and arguments into their minds, which then festers and grows within them like vines slowly strangling out their empathy and humanity.
’The House spreads. Its arteries run throughout the country. Its lifeblood flows into Westminster, into Scotland Yard, into every village and every city. It flows into you, and into your mother. It keeps you alive. It makes you feel safe.’
Presenting this topic through the genre of horror is brilliant, keeping fear and safety a central topic in the novel. ‘For someone to feel safe, another has to be safe,’ the House preaches, ‘for someone, the majority, to prosper, another has to… well. I think you understand…’ The book places the characters in that unsettled, deflated feeling of being post-college and wallowing while waiting to land somewhere, making them all the more susceptible in their unease, and we watch as they are losing a battle of becoming a product of their traumas rather than one they wish to be. Only by returning to the House and confronting them can they ever move forward in life. In the present, Hannah is absent, the friend who ‘always ended being the odd one out, the third wheel,’ which made her the perfect victim for the House where she may or may not be either trapped inside or have fallen victim to the horrors she endured.
‘We were young and idealistic,’ they think of when they braved the House the first time, ‘ we wanted to make some political point of the whole thing.’ The political is always present in this book, but beyond topics of gender Tell Me I’m Worthless also tackles social class head on. Immigration, Brexit, crime, and more are all public conversation, one political ideologues capitalize on for power and profit, and the House is a well-constructed metaphor of these. ‘The most famous haunted places in the world tend to be the big houses and castles,’ Rumfitt writes, ‘because rich people lived in them and the collective blood on their hands, the collective violence that they caused on everyone else in the world, manifests into ghosts.’ Albion, the House and the nation, are examined as the product of years and years of bloodshed, colonialism, racial oppression, patriarchy and more amalgamating into a dark force that transcends the physical world. The reaches of the House occur in every corner of society, even property ownership that leads to pushing out the unhoused and anyone deemed an Other. An effective image occurs early in the book of an abandoned church with ‘a sign outside reading TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. God’s body, decaying, has now been cut off from society; do not touch him, for he is owned by a variety of contractors, and they have legal power over the likes of you.’
Tell Me I’m Worthless is an unflinching and brutally direct novel that combines horror with political and social discourse to deliver a fantastically unsettling story. Alison Rumfitt has taken the reigns from her predecessors and driven the genre of horror and fairy tales deep into the heart of our modern condition, constructing amazing imagery that thrills as much as it chills. Rumfitt has crafted a stunning debut here. This is certainly not for everyone, and I will caution that this book can be quite triggering, but if you dare to enter this book will have its ghosts following you forevermore.
5/5
‘Sometimes, at the end of everything, the only option you have is to make it worse.’
September 25, 2023
Tell Me I'm Worthless was Alison Rumfitt's debut, and what a debut it was. Revisiting this two years on, I can see what a masterpiece of gothic storytelling it is. Every detail is full of meaning, a book that is both subtle and explicit. On the surface, it’s a 21st century twist on a haunted house story, a thoroughly queer reinvigoration of the genre. The haunted house here - named Albion - is representative of a certain type of English identity, yes, but also represents a fascist impulse more broadly. This is a book in conversation with its gothic forbears, but also one that understands our present moment intimately. It can be an apt seasonal read, perfect for Spooky Szn. Or it can upend your world, as when Rumfitt asks: Where were you when we lost the culture war? If there is a book that can give you nightmares, this is it.
January 20, 2023
Dark, violent and messed up. I read this for the haunted house, but it was also about so much more, including trauma, fascism and being trans in the UK. Unfortunately, I felt the house should've been a bigger part of the first half. Pays homage to Jane Eyre, Jamaica Inn and The Bloody Chamber, all of which I would recommend, (you can't go wrong with Angela Carter!) along with many others. It kept me entertained and turning the pages though, just not the comfort read I should've gone for when ill with flu, I'll probably have nightmares about Morrissey lurking under my bed 🙈
January 24, 2024
DNF @ 51%
I'm applauding myself a little for getting this far before I decided to look up spoilers and call it a day. While this book will certainly have its audience, that audience isn't me. Not only do I think the writing is mediocre (and a very clear imitation of Shirley Jackson that falls short), but the mass amounts of hate in this book are nausea-inducing, even for someone, like me, who doesn't have triggers for these particular things.
Content-specific issues I had:
- massive amounts of anti-Semitism (VERY hateful language, numerous cruel Holocaust references, terrible treatment of a Jewish side character)
- how racist Alice is and has been in the past
- the portrayal of a closeted trans man as a very vocal and well-known TERF
- how heavy-handed the usage of rape as a plot device is (it is literally referenced and/or depicted constantly!)
As an aside, while I certainly don't feel like it's fair to hold it against a trans author for writing graphic transphobia, I have never read such gratuitous, over-the-top transphobia in any other book as this one. There's a scene in particular where a forum post/transphobic fantasy is included that is so long-winded and repetitive and cruel that I finally had to tune out the audiobook altogether until it was over.
I had tremendously high hopes for this book and author, and was genuinely banking on having a new favorite of the year here, but every single page has been an utter and complete disappointment and I can't currently say I have any desire to read future works by Rumfitt.
Thank you to the publisher and LibroFM for the audio review copy! All thoughts are honest and my own.
✨ Representation: Alice is a trans woman; Ila is Jewish/South Asian and a closeted trans man; multiple queer side characters
✨ Content warnings for:
———
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I'm applauding myself a little for getting this far before I decided to look up spoilers and call it a day. While this book will certainly have its audience, that audience isn't me. Not only do I think the writing is mediocre (and a very clear imitation of Shirley Jackson that falls short), but the mass amounts of hate in this book are nausea-inducing, even for someone, like me, who doesn't have triggers for these particular things.
Content-specific issues I had:
- massive amounts of anti-Semitism (VERY hateful language, numerous cruel Holocaust references, terrible treatment of a Jewish side character)
- how racist Alice is and has been in the past
- the portrayal of a closeted trans man as a very vocal and well-known TERF
- how heavy-handed the usage of rape as a plot device is (it is literally referenced and/or depicted constantly!)
As an aside, while I certainly don't feel like it's fair to hold it against a trans author for writing graphic transphobia, I have never read such gratuitous, over-the-top transphobia in any other book as this one. There's a scene in particular where a forum post/transphobic fantasy is included that is so long-winded and repetitive and cruel that I finally had to tune out the audiobook altogether until it was over.
I had tremendously high hopes for this book and author, and was genuinely banking on having a new favorite of the year here, but every single page has been an utter and complete disappointment and I can't currently say I have any desire to read future works by Rumfitt.
Thank you to the publisher and LibroFM for the audio review copy! All thoughts are honest and my own.
✨ Representation: Alice is a trans woman; Ila is Jewish/South Asian and a closeted trans man; multiple queer side characters
✨ Content warnings for:
———
twitter | booktok | bookstagram | blog
December 2, 2023
Wow!!!
Tell Me I'm Worthless is an angry, brutal, upsetting allegorical haunted house story that hits like a truck. It's depressing, rage inducing, and creepy at times.
Three women go into a haunted house, only two come out. The story follows the remaining two as they struggle to survive in a hateful world as the house urges them back.
The writing style is literary/stream of consciousness, is almost dreamlike at times, and is repetitive in the same way Chuck Palhinuik uses repetition.
The ending, while still traumatic, was a bit anticlimactic, but it was still very effective.
I’m just in awe honestly. The raw emotion was so real and palpable. I listened to the audio, and I think that it only enhances it all.
Tell Me I'm Worthless is an angry, brutal, upsetting allegorical haunted house story that hits like a truck. It's depressing, rage inducing, and creepy at times.
Three women go into a haunted house, only two come out. The story follows the remaining two as they struggle to survive in a hateful world as the house urges them back.
The writing style is literary/stream of consciousness, is almost dreamlike at times, and is repetitive in the same way Chuck Palhinuik uses repetition.
The ending, while still traumatic, was a bit anticlimactic, but it was still very effective.
I’m just in awe honestly. The raw emotion was so real and palpable. I listened to the audio, and I think that it only enhances it all.
October 27, 2021
Okay, wow. If you read Tell Me I’m Worthless, prepare to be haunted: for days after finishing it I was infected with its story, sick with it, couldn’t stop thinking about it. There are so many moments, observations and images from this book that have crawled inside and made themselves at home under my skin.
Three years ago, three girls – Alice, Ila and Hannah – entered the House, a corrupted, haunted place. Hannah never came out, and in the aftermath, Alice and Ila’s relationship is radically transformed. Once best friends and lovers, they now barely speak and have somehow come to occupy opposing ideological standpoints. A bit later, we find out that each of them believe the other to be guilty of violent and degrading assault, though it seems they can’t both be right. The only way out of it all is for Alice and Ila to return the House, and however horrifying that idea is, they are inexorably drawn back.
Sometimes, at the end of everything, the only option you have is to make it worse.
Tell Me I’m Worthless is something entirely new. It’s a haunted house story unlike any other, and it’s also about fascism and trauma and guilt and gender and what it’s like to try and perform an acceptable impression of a functioning human being after bad shit has happened to you. It’s electrifying. It’s disgusting. It’s hot. It actually made me fucking THINK. It’s the best book about what it is to be a woman (specifically in modern Britain) that I’ve read in years, possibly ever. It’s the most radical horror novel of the year and probably the decade.
People who spend a lot of time talking about books, including me, are probably guilty of saying something is ~like nothing else I’ve ever read~ far too often, but that truly applies here. The only thing I can think of that I’d perhaps stand it next to is Gary Budden’s London Incognita, which has a similar punk spirit flowing through its veins, but the fact that Tell Me I’m Worthless is written specifically from a queer/trans/female perspective makes it feel that much more radical.
I might write more when I reread it – which I definitely will. Honestly, I’ve struggled to find the language to describe how good it is and how it made me feel; it’s an experience. Just know that if you are at all interested in horror, this book is essential reading.
I received an advance review copy of Tell Me I’m Worthless from the publisher, Cipher Press.
TinyLetter | Linktree
Three years ago, three girls – Alice, Ila and Hannah – entered the House, a corrupted, haunted place. Hannah never came out, and in the aftermath, Alice and Ila’s relationship is radically transformed. Once best friends and lovers, they now barely speak and have somehow come to occupy opposing ideological standpoints. A bit later, we find out that each of them believe the other to be guilty of violent and degrading assault, though it seems they can’t both be right. The only way out of it all is for Alice and Ila to return the House, and however horrifying that idea is, they are inexorably drawn back.
Sometimes, at the end of everything, the only option you have is to make it worse.
Tell Me I’m Worthless is something entirely new. It’s a haunted house story unlike any other, and it’s also about fascism and trauma and guilt and gender and what it’s like to try and perform an acceptable impression of a functioning human being after bad shit has happened to you. It’s electrifying. It’s disgusting. It’s hot. It actually made me fucking THINK. It’s the best book about what it is to be a woman (specifically in modern Britain) that I’ve read in years, possibly ever. It’s the most radical horror novel of the year and probably the decade.
People who spend a lot of time talking about books, including me, are probably guilty of saying something is ~like nothing else I’ve ever read~ far too often, but that truly applies here. The only thing I can think of that I’d perhaps stand it next to is Gary Budden’s London Incognita, which has a similar punk spirit flowing through its veins, but the fact that Tell Me I’m Worthless is written specifically from a queer/trans/female perspective makes it feel that much more radical.
I might write more when I reread it – which I definitely will. Honestly, I’ve struggled to find the language to describe how good it is and how it made me feel; it’s an experience. Just know that if you are at all interested in horror, this book is essential reading.
I received an advance review copy of Tell Me I’m Worthless from the publisher, Cipher Press.
TinyLetter | Linktree
Want to read
July 29, 2021Beware.
October 24, 2022
WARNING: THIS BOOK IS ALMOST ENTIRELY DEPICTIONS OF GRAPHIC SEXUAL ASSAULT. seriously, it's like a speedrun to see how sexually violent you can make a book in a short, afternoon read.
a pretty blatant ripoff of shirley jackson without any respect to what made jackson's writing so legendary (and i say this as someone who didn't even really like the haunting of hill house - it was a DNF for me). aggressively political yet signifying nothing, it's another book on my shelf of 'people hyped this up for some reason, and i wonder if they really liked it or if they felt compelled to say that they liked it.'
i'll knock this part out first since it's fast and easy: craft wise, this book desperately needed an editor. typos, missing apostrophes and periods, run on sentences - this book had it all. one sentence i recorded was 155 words long. given that the general sweet spot is between 25-30 depending on your style, that's staggeringly drawn out! it made some parts of the book borderline unreadable, hence why i had to resort to skimming. it also had parts that were very disjointed like a psychotic episode, but rather than leave the reader unsettled and fascinated mostly just seemed pretentious and graphic for the sake of being graphic. masturbatory, as a term, comes to mind, and i mean it as derogatorily as possible.
now for the plot, which can be summed up as 'what if hill house were actually powered by evil nazi ghosts' - or to put it specifically, the spirit of capitalist white supremacy in england. i am not joking, this book has zero subtlety, grace or wit about it. it's childlike in how naked the metaphors are, how direct it is in the stances it takes. there is no room for any alternative readings. this book is basically what it says on the tin.
parading around in this metaphoric landscape is our tormented trio: a radical feminist (or TERF as she is referenced) named ila, her trans woman ex-friends with benefits alice, and the third wheeling straight girl hannah who died in the haunted house they all went exploring one day. ila and alice have serious baggage: in an apoplectic fit while possessed by The House that consumed hannah, they brutally raped and disfigured one another, tossing the accusation of rape around like a game of hot potato.
... at least, i think that's what happened. it's very hard to follow as a story due to its dreamlike run-on sentences. if you get lost on the plot, that may be intentional; this is one of the few books where 'it was all a dream' would've been its saving grace, had it been deployed as a plot device.
the misogyny in this book is palpable. women are tortured, debased, bullied, beaten, carved into and mocked relentlessly, and for what end? there is no revenge fantasy akin to gone girl or i spit on your grave where women are chewed up and spat out only to find opportunities to reclaim personhood; there is simply a hatred of women one can feel in each page as if written in braille.
there is no reprieve in hatefulness: the book is wickedly antisemitic as well, where at one point alice describes ila internally as 'just another Jewish sex creep.' the goal of this seems to be to communicate that the house is swaying both alice and ila to be their worst selves: for alice, this is being a revolting racist terrified of immigrants and people of color; for ila, it's being a radical feminist.
the radical feminist portion of the book has ila sexually assaulted by a major radical activist early on, only to be accused of being the assailant herself on twitter, which i think is meant to be some degree of ironic because ila is championing for single sex spaces due to her identity as alice's rape victim. ngl it's just... such a stupid portion of the book. i keep reading these books where radical feminism is being misrepresented, and i just have to tell y'all now: this shit is not making your book more realistic, and you aren't being nearly as clever or incisive as you want to be. it does, however, make your book much funnier, so don't let me stop you. embarrass yourselves further, by all means.
alice, meanwhile, flits through party scenes like a phantom, drugged up in place of a personality while waxing poetic about the haunted poster fixed above the bed. alice's scenes spend a lot of time ruminating about how shitty it is to be poor and how miserable and horrible cheap apartments tend to be, which feels a lot like class-based posturing. i'm not going to assume the author's financial position here, but this book is part of an overall trend i've noticed where there is this desire to represent 'the reality' of poverty without ever recognizing the love, warmth and resilience of people living in these difficult situations. just more edgelord shit that does nothing to enhance the mood of of the book nor its plot.
hannah was hardly a character at all. she had a black boyfriend, she was a pretty white girl, the house crunched her body up into the shape of a swastika, and ila and alice felt pretty sad about it but not really that sad. that was about it. in a way, the book would've been fine had she not been included at all.
the house itself - named albion - is its own character, but given that the house is pretty clearly meant to represent the evil of white, cisheteropatriarchial end-stage capitalism, such attempts to build it up as anything but a windmill for the author to tilt at ring hollow. there are brief glimpses into its past, into the residents that used to live there and the residents that shall live there in the future, but the lack of editing truly did this book dirty in these sequences. it was a drunk, meandering wander through words, and at points it was like wading through quicksand to get to a coherent sentence.
in the end, ila and alice set albion on fire, and years later, the land gets a new house built on it. i guess the evil fascist ghost haunting the earth it stood on repossess the new house, and some little freak emboldened by 4channers creates a homemade bomb and attacks a pride parade that alice and ila - now harry, having transitioned - attend. i think they might die at the end but i wasn't really paying attention at that point. i guess true love does not conquer all.
there isn't a whole lot to say about the characters or plot itself beyond any of that, because in a way, the book seems more like a political statement. which is fair, if that was the intention, but as far as stories-as-political-statements go, this is more ham-handed than most. there is an art to gracefully weaving political stances into fiction, and TMIW is pretty much What Not To Do At A Stoplight.
one of the major parts of this book i loathed was that, despite trying to tackle heavy-hitting themes and subjects, it really felt more like an exercise in gore. i love horror as a genre and i think there's a lot of ways you can get pretty cerebral and thought provoking while using horror as your vehicle, but this was a complete car crash. there was nothing thoughtful about this, nor thought-provoking. it was just a bunch of navel gazing with some slurs thrown in. like manhunt, a similarly violent and pointless book, TMIW tries to tackle the sticky subject of trans rights and women's rights colliding their horns together but fails to say anything meaningful.
if anything, these books leave me with a grim, foreboding feeling: rather than try to reach common ground or hear what opposing sides have to say, it's better to write brutal, dehumanizing fiction of your opponents where in your fictional land of make-believe, they can be puppets for you to manipulate all your darkest desires on, and no one can criticize it lest they be accused of sympathizing with fascists. in books like these, there is no room for seeing eye to eye - not when you yearn for the chance to dig your fingers deep into their sockets and leave the whole world blind.
and, really, that's the scariest part of the book.
a pretty blatant ripoff of shirley jackson without any respect to what made jackson's writing so legendary (and i say this as someone who didn't even really like the haunting of hill house - it was a DNF for me). aggressively political yet signifying nothing, it's another book on my shelf of 'people hyped this up for some reason, and i wonder if they really liked it or if they felt compelled to say that they liked it.'
i'll knock this part out first since it's fast and easy: craft wise, this book desperately needed an editor. typos, missing apostrophes and periods, run on sentences - this book had it all. one sentence i recorded was 155 words long. given that the general sweet spot is between 25-30 depending on your style, that's staggeringly drawn out! it made some parts of the book borderline unreadable, hence why i had to resort to skimming. it also had parts that were very disjointed like a psychotic episode, but rather than leave the reader unsettled and fascinated mostly just seemed pretentious and graphic for the sake of being graphic. masturbatory, as a term, comes to mind, and i mean it as derogatorily as possible.
now for the plot, which can be summed up as 'what if hill house were actually powered by evil nazi ghosts' - or to put it specifically, the spirit of capitalist white supremacy in england. i am not joking, this book has zero subtlety, grace or wit about it. it's childlike in how naked the metaphors are, how direct it is in the stances it takes. there is no room for any alternative readings. this book is basically what it says on the tin.
parading around in this metaphoric landscape is our tormented trio: a radical feminist (or TERF as she is referenced) named ila, her trans woman ex-friends with benefits alice, and the third wheeling straight girl hannah who died in the haunted house they all went exploring one day. ila and alice have serious baggage: in an apoplectic fit while possessed by The House that consumed hannah, they brutally raped and disfigured one another, tossing the accusation of rape around like a game of hot potato.
... at least, i think that's what happened. it's very hard to follow as a story due to its dreamlike run-on sentences. if you get lost on the plot, that may be intentional; this is one of the few books where 'it was all a dream' would've been its saving grace, had it been deployed as a plot device.
the misogyny in this book is palpable. women are tortured, debased, bullied, beaten, carved into and mocked relentlessly, and for what end? there is no revenge fantasy akin to gone girl or i spit on your grave where women are chewed up and spat out only to find opportunities to reclaim personhood; there is simply a hatred of women one can feel in each page as if written in braille.
there is no reprieve in hatefulness: the book is wickedly antisemitic as well, where at one point alice describes ila internally as 'just another Jewish sex creep.' the goal of this seems to be to communicate that the house is swaying both alice and ila to be their worst selves: for alice, this is being a revolting racist terrified of immigrants and people of color; for ila, it's being a radical feminist.
the radical feminist portion of the book has ila sexually assaulted by a major radical activist early on, only to be accused of being the assailant herself on twitter, which i think is meant to be some degree of ironic because ila is championing for single sex spaces due to her identity as alice's rape victim. ngl it's just... such a stupid portion of the book. i keep reading these books where radical feminism is being misrepresented, and i just have to tell y'all now: this shit is not making your book more realistic, and you aren't being nearly as clever or incisive as you want to be. it does, however, make your book much funnier, so don't let me stop you. embarrass yourselves further, by all means.
alice, meanwhile, flits through party scenes like a phantom, drugged up in place of a personality while waxing poetic about the haunted poster fixed above the bed. alice's scenes spend a lot of time ruminating about how shitty it is to be poor and how miserable and horrible cheap apartments tend to be, which feels a lot like class-based posturing. i'm not going to assume the author's financial position here, but this book is part of an overall trend i've noticed where there is this desire to represent 'the reality' of poverty without ever recognizing the love, warmth and resilience of people living in these difficult situations. just more edgelord shit that does nothing to enhance the mood of of the book nor its plot.
hannah was hardly a character at all. she had a black boyfriend, she was a pretty white girl, the house crunched her body up into the shape of a swastika, and ila and alice felt pretty sad about it but not really that sad. that was about it. in a way, the book would've been fine had she not been included at all.
the house itself - named albion - is its own character, but given that the house is pretty clearly meant to represent the evil of white, cisheteropatriarchial end-stage capitalism, such attempts to build it up as anything but a windmill for the author to tilt at ring hollow. there are brief glimpses into its past, into the residents that used to live there and the residents that shall live there in the future, but the lack of editing truly did this book dirty in these sequences. it was a drunk, meandering wander through words, and at points it was like wading through quicksand to get to a coherent sentence.
in the end, ila and alice set albion on fire, and years later, the land gets a new house built on it. i guess the evil fascist ghost haunting the earth it stood on repossess the new house, and some little freak emboldened by 4channers creates a homemade bomb and attacks a pride parade that alice and ila - now harry, having transitioned - attend. i think they might die at the end but i wasn't really paying attention at that point. i guess true love does not conquer all.
there isn't a whole lot to say about the characters or plot itself beyond any of that, because in a way, the book seems more like a political statement. which is fair, if that was the intention, but as far as stories-as-political-statements go, this is more ham-handed than most. there is an art to gracefully weaving political stances into fiction, and TMIW is pretty much What Not To Do At A Stoplight.
one of the major parts of this book i loathed was that, despite trying to tackle heavy-hitting themes and subjects, it really felt more like an exercise in gore. i love horror as a genre and i think there's a lot of ways you can get pretty cerebral and thought provoking while using horror as your vehicle, but this was a complete car crash. there was nothing thoughtful about this, nor thought-provoking. it was just a bunch of navel gazing with some slurs thrown in. like manhunt, a similarly violent and pointless book, TMIW tries to tackle the sticky subject of trans rights and women's rights colliding their horns together but fails to say anything meaningful.
if anything, these books leave me with a grim, foreboding feeling: rather than try to reach common ground or hear what opposing sides have to say, it's better to write brutal, dehumanizing fiction of your opponents where in your fictional land of make-believe, they can be puppets for you to manipulate all your darkest desires on, and no one can criticize it lest they be accused of sympathizing with fascists. in books like these, there is no room for seeing eye to eye - not when you yearn for the chance to dig your fingers deep into their sockets and leave the whole world blind.
and, really, that's the scariest part of the book.
Read
October 27, 2022DNF @ 15% - No rating and will not be included in my 2022 reading challenge.
Much too political and the gratuitous sex is turning my stomach. I read a very informative review that told me all that I need to know about this novel, it gets even more disturbing and disgusting, so I don't have to suffer through this any longer. Anyone have some brain bleach?
Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor/Forge for my complimentary copy.
Much too political and the gratuitous sex is turning my stomach. I read a very informative review that told me all that I need to know about this novel, it gets even more disturbing and disgusting, so I don't have to suffer through this any longer. Anyone have some brain bleach?
Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor/Forge for my complimentary copy.
January 4, 2024
If ever a book could be described as punk, it would be Alison Rumfitt’s debut horror novel, Tell Me I’m Worthless. It’s edgy, vicious, and in-your-face – and unapologetic for all of it.
The book is a bit typical in that it’s a haunted house tale where three friends enter the evil house but only two return. But trust me, past that typicality, the rest of the story is unlike anything else you’ve ever read.
My dilemma is that I don’t know who to recommend Rumfitt's book to. Because to me, the horror that lies within its pages is beyond horror. It’s trauma, and it’s violent, explicit trauma at that. The author herself even writes a content warning in the front of the book, with the list of red flags including racism, fascism, antisemitism, transphobia, rape, self-harm, and suicide. All this to mean … if you have a trigger, you’ll find it here. You must have a thick skin to read and appreciate Rumfitt’s story.
And appreciate it, I did. For the last month or so, I’ve been in a reading rut where books just haven’t been cutting it. But Worthless was like a bright, shining light in a sea of gray words, a standout read when I struggled to even pick up a book. The characters are enigmatic and complex; the prose is fever dreamlike and challenging; and Albion, the sentient haunted house, is a fascinating personality.
I love what Rumfitt does here.
The book is a bit typical in that it’s a haunted house tale where three friends enter the evil house but only two return. But trust me, past that typicality, the rest of the story is unlike anything else you’ve ever read.
My dilemma is that I don’t know who to recommend Rumfitt's book to. Because to me, the horror that lies within its pages is beyond horror. It’s trauma, and it’s violent, explicit trauma at that. The author herself even writes a content warning in the front of the book, with the list of red flags including racism, fascism, antisemitism, transphobia, rape, self-harm, and suicide. All this to mean … if you have a trigger, you’ll find it here. You must have a thick skin to read and appreciate Rumfitt’s story.
And appreciate it, I did. For the last month or so, I’ve been in a reading rut where books just haven’t been cutting it. But Worthless was like a bright, shining light in a sea of gray words, a standout read when I struggled to even pick up a book. The characters are enigmatic and complex; the prose is fever dreamlike and challenging; and Albion, the sentient haunted house, is a fascinating personality.
I love what Rumfitt does here.
January 18, 2024
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What if the literal concept of bigotry became self-conscious?
TELL ME I'M WORTHLESS is probably the darkest, most disturbing book I've read in a while. It's actually probably a good thing I read it now, when I'm actually feeling pretty good, because I could see this being a two or a one-star read if I were in the wrong state of mind to read it. It is a bleak, depressing, disturbing book, filled with hateful imagery and symbolism. It is a book that takes the idea of the power of anger becoming a transcending force that permeates the physical forces of reality like a cancer or a rot, bringing with it supernatural powers that can haunt a place like a ghost. It is like The Grudge, but fueled by whole generations of fascism, discrimination, and hate.
***WARNING: OFFENSIVE DESCRIPTIONS AND SPOILERS TO FOLLOW***
There are three narrators in this book: Ila, Alice, and the House. Ila seems to be coded as a closeted transman who self-identifies with female pronouns and is an active TERF. She is also a predator, participating in the same behaviors that she uses to condemn and deligitimize trans people and their existence, despite also being marginalized herself (Jewish/Middle Eastern and, ofc, queer-coded). Alice is a transwoman who cam girls, emasculating men for money. She lives in an apartment that is haunted and believes that tendrils of The House of seeped into her very existence, hungering for her even now. She also suffers from serious gender dysphoria, and cam girling is her way of projecting this dysphoria onto a masochistic audience that craves humiliation and emasculation for sexual gratification.
And then there's The House, steeped in history. The House where three girls entered but only two left. The House has seen terrible things and reveled in them. It's almost a fairytale-like figure, except when all the paint and panels have been stripped away, you'll find visceral gore and horror. Here, haunting almost seems to represent the process of radicalization. People who come to the House might seem innocent, but they have the seeds of fascism burning inside them already: the House, with its strange powers, makes them grow. And even if they manage to escape, those seeds will still blossom.
I felt so much anxiety reading this book. It really does have TWs for literally everything, including things like antisemitism, graphic transphobia with violent language, and eugenics. Despite all that, it's a compelling story. It reminded me a lot of the countercultural, transgressive horror of the 90s, penned by authors such as Tannith Lee, Poppy Z. Brite, and Kathe Koja. In fact, I think if you enjoyed those authors, you'll probably enjoy this book. It shares a lot of the same themes as those books. I'm not sure I'd read this again and I'd be careful who I recommended it to, but the concept of imperfect and viciously flawed queer people populating a horror novel like this made me think of what chels_ebooks said in their review of GAYWYCK, "the first gay gothic novel," about how GAYWYCK's characters weren't meant to be aspirational: instead the book aimed to just titillate gay readers with the same salacious thrills and chills as the "straight" gothic novels, just gay. I feel like in some ways, TELL ME I'M WORTHLESS does that for genderqueer individuals, too. It's messed up shock horror with queer characters who do messed up things in very messed up situations.
4 to 4.5 stars
November 4, 2023
Now, if three girls enter a house and only two leave, whois to blame? And if both girls tell a different story, but you read online that you have to BELIEVE WOMEN, what do you? Do you decide one is a woman and one isn't, so you can believe one them but not the other? Do you take the side of the woman who is most like you? Or the most intersectional one? But one is rich, and white, and trans, and the other is rich, and Asian and a lesbian, and cis (?), and fuck, who wins here? In the end it's so hard to choose where your sympathies settle. So, you go online and find an `intersectionality score calculator' on the internet. You use it to try to work out who is more oppressed. According to the calculator, Alice has an intersectionality score of 44, making her more privileged than 32% of others. Who these others are is unclear. Ila, meanwhile, has a score of 64. This should mean that you sympathise more with her, but you have seen inside her head, you know the way she thinks. You wonder where Hannah would score. She comes out with a score of 25. But despite this, she never left the House, whilst the others did leave; whilst they went back to their lives, she stayed there collecting dust. And anyway, you can't trust the numbers anyway. Numbers have been known to lie. Numbers have been known to show bias, statistics often have racist undertones, for example.
So, there's just two girls leaving a house and maybe you don't have to take a side, maybe you can empathise with them both and hope they get the therapy and help they need and can learn to forgive one another. No. You can't do that.
Alison Rumfitt's Tell Me I'm Worthless, published by Cipher Press, is the latest novel from the wonderful Republic of Consciousness Press Book Club, which showcases the best, ground-breaking, writing from the UK's small press scene.
The brooding, sinister presence at the centre of this novel is a house, one that takes its name, Albion from William Blake's poetry:
No live organism can continue to exist compassionately under conditions of absolute fascism, even the birds in Italy under Mussolini were observed to take part in rallies and violence. Albion, not compassionate, not sane, stood ringed by a tangled forest, holding inside, however messily, its overpowering ideology; it had stood so for a hundred years but would only stand for one more before it entered into the long process of becoming something else, at the end of which it was hoped it would seem to all the world that it had always been that way. Within, floors crumbled, ceilings gaped open, vines choked the chimneys and the windows. Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of the house, and whatever walked there marched on Rome.
And Albion takes is literary precedents from the canon of haunted house novels, for this is a novel rooted in intertexuality, from Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, through Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and Jamaica Inn, Clive Barker's Coldheart Canyon, Hell House by Richard Matheson and Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching (which also explores the idea of a haunted house as a symbol for fascism/racism). But perhaps the most explicit influence is Shirley Jackson's work, including The Haunting of Hill House, whose opening lines are (c.f. the passage above from Tell Me I'm Worthless):
But if Rumfitt is following, consciously, in literary footsteps, she still very much carves out a new, powerful, path of her own.
At university, in an unnamed city but rather like Brighton, three young women, Alice, Ila and Hannah decide to break in and spend a night in the House, as Alice, looking back, explains:
The House, not compassionate, stood ringed by a thick, angry forest, holding inside, however messily, its overpowering ideology; it had stood so for a hundred years and would stand for three more. Inside, the hallways were as still and empty as a frozen lake, and the walls found themselves leaning in different directions depending on who they hated the most that day. Sometimes, animals would wander into the House, but they never wandered out again. Whoever owned it did not seem to care for it, so we, Ila, Hannah and I, decided we'd break in and spend a night there. Young people can be stupid. We wanted to make some political point of the whole thing, we disagreed that great old houses like this should be empty when there were homeless people on every street. We knew that the owner might send people to pull us out, but we wanted to prove something. We were young and idealistic. The House stood on the outskirts of a city, with a huge DANGER KEEP OUT sign across the rusted gates. The fence, however, had decayed, so we bypassed the gates and crossed the boundaries easily. Nobody was around.
But that night leaves their lives altered, Hannah is never seen again and Ila and Alice traumitised, physically and mentally, each convinced they were raped by the other. The novel is set around three years later as Ila and Alice, who have not spoken since, attempt to repair the damage to their lives. But, as the opening quote suggests, the novel is set against a political background where fascism seems to be on the rise again, and each has been pulled in a different direction. Alice, a transgender woman, has poster of an (unnamed but easy to guess) 1980s pop-star on her wall, one known then for his penchant for flowers and fluid sexuality, but now for his sympathies with racism, a poster that literally haunts and attempts to possess her. Ila, of mixed Israeli and Pakistani heritage, has become prominent in the gender-critical feminist movement (aka TERFs), using her account of her alleged rape by Alice to support those seeking 'safe spaces' for women away from transexuals, her tweets liked by an (unnamed) famous children's author.
This is a story that doesn't pull its punches (those, typically unnamed, whose views are exposed range from Mosley and Enoch Powell through to Mumsnet, as a parenting site turned anti-trans haven). Neither Alice nor Ila comes entirely well (although the threats they perceive are also presented). Alice's sections are narrated in the first person and Ila's in the third, which I think reflects the author's acknowledgement that Alice's experiences are closer to her own, as a white, transgender woman, whereas with Ila, the author is attempting to explore what might drive her perspective. From an interview with Pink News:
Overall, a powerful, at times disturbing work, indeed the author felt it appropriate to include a trigger warning at the start, given the trauma involved. The literary intertextuality is highly impressive and I suspect my appreciation of the novel would have been greater still was I more familiar with its literary ancestors.
A strong contender for the Republic of Consciousness Prize and a book I hope the Woman's Prize next year is brave enough to embrace:
I sometimes think that what I want is really misogynistic. Sometimes in the worst moments I ask if the TERFs are right and me wanting a cunt and tits and nice hair is because I'm a self-centred male monster and I want to be in bathrooms and changing rooms and I want to win women's sports competitions and laugh because they can't say anything and I want to win the Women's Fiction Prize and they'll say but look that's not a woman and the thought police will come for them for thinking that but in actual fact they'll probably just get an OBE for it and get a book deal and then what will I be? I want to be a woman. I am a woman.
Interviews with the author:
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/10/29...
https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-cultu...
https://audioboom.com/posts/7968947-a...
So, there's just two girls leaving a house and maybe you don't have to take a side, maybe you can empathise with them both and hope they get the therapy and help they need and can learn to forgive one another. No. You can't do that.
Alison Rumfitt's Tell Me I'm Worthless, published by Cipher Press, is the latest novel from the wonderful Republic of Consciousness Press Book Club, which showcases the best, ground-breaking, writing from the UK's small press scene.
The brooding, sinister presence at the centre of this novel is a house, one that takes its name, Albion from William Blake's poetry:
No live organism can continue to exist compassionately under conditions of absolute fascism, even the birds in Italy under Mussolini were observed to take part in rallies and violence. Albion, not compassionate, not sane, stood ringed by a tangled forest, holding inside, however messily, its overpowering ideology; it had stood so for a hundred years but would only stand for one more before it entered into the long process of becoming something else, at the end of which it was hoped it would seem to all the world that it had always been that way. Within, floors crumbled, ceilings gaped open, vines choked the chimneys and the windows. Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of the house, and whatever walked there marched on Rome.
And Albion takes is literary precedents from the canon of haunted house novels, for this is a novel rooted in intertexuality, from Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, through Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and Jamaica Inn, Clive Barker's Coldheart Canyon, Hell House by Richard Matheson and Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching (which also explores the idea of a haunted house as a symbol for fascism/racism). But perhaps the most explicit influence is Shirley Jackson's work, including The Haunting of Hill House, whose opening lines are (c.f. the passage above from Tell Me I'm Worthless):
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
But if Rumfitt is following, consciously, in literary footsteps, she still very much carves out a new, powerful, path of her own.
At university, in an unnamed city but rather like Brighton, three young women, Alice, Ila and Hannah decide to break in and spend a night in the House, as Alice, looking back, explains:
The House, not compassionate, stood ringed by a thick, angry forest, holding inside, however messily, its overpowering ideology; it had stood so for a hundred years and would stand for three more. Inside, the hallways were as still and empty as a frozen lake, and the walls found themselves leaning in different directions depending on who they hated the most that day. Sometimes, animals would wander into the House, but they never wandered out again. Whoever owned it did not seem to care for it, so we, Ila, Hannah and I, decided we'd break in and spend a night there. Young people can be stupid. We wanted to make some political point of the whole thing, we disagreed that great old houses like this should be empty when there were homeless people on every street. We knew that the owner might send people to pull us out, but we wanted to prove something. We were young and idealistic. The House stood on the outskirts of a city, with a huge DANGER KEEP OUT sign across the rusted gates. The fence, however, had decayed, so we bypassed the gates and crossed the boundaries easily. Nobody was around.
But that night leaves their lives altered, Hannah is never seen again and Ila and Alice traumitised, physically and mentally, each convinced they were raped by the other. The novel is set around three years later as Ila and Alice, who have not spoken since, attempt to repair the damage to their lives. But, as the opening quote suggests, the novel is set against a political background where fascism seems to be on the rise again, and each has been pulled in a different direction. Alice, a transgender woman, has poster of an (unnamed but easy to guess) 1980s pop-star on her wall, one known then for his penchant for flowers and fluid sexuality, but now for his sympathies with racism, a poster that literally haunts and attempts to possess her. Ila, of mixed Israeli and Pakistani heritage, has become prominent in the gender-critical feminist movement (aka TERFs), using her account of her alleged rape by Alice to support those seeking 'safe spaces' for women away from transexuals, her tweets liked by an (unnamed) famous children's author.
This is a story that doesn't pull its punches (those, typically unnamed, whose views are exposed range from Mosley and Enoch Powell through to Mumsnet, as a parenting site turned anti-trans haven). Neither Alice nor Ila comes entirely well (although the threats they perceive are also presented). Alice's sections are narrated in the first person and Ila's in the third, which I think reflects the author's acknowledgement that Alice's experiences are closer to her own, as a white, transgender woman, whereas with Ila, the author is attempting to explore what might drive her perspective. From an interview with Pink News:
The thing I enjoyed was getting into the headspace of someone who, if they met me on the street, would probably hate me. I was trying to build a psyche of someone like that and work out if there was a way that I could still empathise with them. It’s kind of telling that Ila doesn’t ever quite feel like she is with the gender critical movement all the way. I don’t know if I could have written an unrepentant TERF with no point of origin of their bigotry. It was an experiment but it was an experiment I really relished.
Overall, a powerful, at times disturbing work, indeed the author felt it appropriate to include a trigger warning at the start, given the trauma involved. The literary intertextuality is highly impressive and I suspect my appreciation of the novel would have been greater still was I more familiar with its literary ancestors.
A strong contender for the Republic of Consciousness Prize and a book I hope the Woman's Prize next year is brave enough to embrace:
I sometimes think that what I want is really misogynistic. Sometimes in the worst moments I ask if the TERFs are right and me wanting a cunt and tits and nice hair is because I'm a self-centred male monster and I want to be in bathrooms and changing rooms and I want to win women's sports competitions and laugh because they can't say anything and I want to win the Women's Fiction Prize and they'll say but look that's not a woman and the thought police will come for them for thinking that but in actual fact they'll probably just get an OBE for it and get a book deal and then what will I be? I want to be a woman. I am a woman.
Interviews with the author:
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August 22, 2022this book is going to haunt me and I don’t want to look at it ever again cause yes it was good but it was also horrible
May 5, 2023
five minutes until my podcast episode is out so i will use the time to speak
i am trying really hard to think of something i liked about this and i'm coming up empty.
i remember vividly listening to it at one part and going "oh, this is an interesting point actually", a feeling that lasted for an entire five seconds before the entire narrative just turned into, and i basically quote "slut whore cunt tranny"
i don't really mind swearing in books and i don't mind crude language but - come on. there were times this had nothing else going on. there were paragraphs and paragraphs just repeating the word "cunt". what are you trying to do? is this supposed to shock me? i'm bored and this is laughable.
the constant use of obscenities aside, the writing itself was also not it. but that's not even my main thing.
this book lacked any kind of substance.
it's like "this house is a nazi, fascism is bad". i know!! you don't have to spell it out for me!! i hate it when a book takes me by the hand and goes "oh you baby booboo, let me explain the message to you because you too STUPID to understand it yourself". i am not and even if i was then surely that's my problem, you don't have to make sure i get it ™. if your novel is well written it will deliver the message without you having to slap a piece of wood against my head with the words "THE MESSAGE" written on it.
my other main problem: this entire book is just about rape. there's nothing i hate more than horror that solely uses rape and the threat of rape to bring its point across. "oh maybe the real horror was the, well, really real every day horror all along, boo 👻" - give me a break.
i was debating between three and two stars towards the end of this (i know nothing about what i said alludes to a three star rating but the audiobook had some nice sound effects so) but then the last chapter introduced harry and i was like "who the fuck is harry"
it's the TERF turned trans man :) because of course it is. 1 star.
read as part of 202-Queer 🌈✨
i am trying really hard to think of something i liked about this and i'm coming up empty.
i remember vividly listening to it at one part and going "oh, this is an interesting point actually", a feeling that lasted for an entire five seconds before the entire narrative just turned into, and i basically quote "slut whore cunt tranny"
i don't really mind swearing in books and i don't mind crude language but - come on. there were times this had nothing else going on. there were paragraphs and paragraphs just repeating the word "cunt". what are you trying to do? is this supposed to shock me? i'm bored and this is laughable.
the constant use of obscenities aside, the writing itself was also not it. but that's not even my main thing.
this book lacked any kind of substance.
it's like "this house is a nazi, fascism is bad". i know!! you don't have to spell it out for me!! i hate it when a book takes me by the hand and goes "oh you baby booboo, let me explain the message to you because you too STUPID to understand it yourself". i am not and even if i was then surely that's my problem, you don't have to make sure i get it ™. if your novel is well written it will deliver the message without you having to slap a piece of wood against my head with the words "THE MESSAGE" written on it.
my other main problem: this entire book is just about rape. there's nothing i hate more than horror that solely uses rape and the threat of rape to bring its point across. "oh maybe the real horror was the, well, really real every day horror all along, boo 👻" - give me a break.
i was debating between three and two stars towards the end of this (i know nothing about what i said alludes to a three star rating but the audiobook had some nice sound effects so) but then the last chapter introduced harry and i was like "who the fuck is harry"
it's the TERF turned trans man :) because of course it is. 1 star.
read as part of 202-Queer 🌈✨
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June 1, 2023TELL ME I’M WORTHLESS by Alison Rumfitt
https://bookshop.org/a/7576/978125086...
Release Date: January 17th, 2023
General Genre/BISAC Categories: Adult Horror, Occult & Supernatural, LBTQIA2S+
Subgenre/Themes: Haunted House, Human Monsters, Mind Bender, Friendships, Fascism, Trauma, Transgender Experience
Writing Style: Abstract, Experimental, Multiple POV
What You Need to Know: You need to know how tragically bleak and dark this book feels while you’re reading it. Seriously, I recommend a good check-in with yourself before you pick it up to make sure you’re in a strong mental headspace before you take this journey with Rumfitt. There were several times where I just had to set it down and get into something lighthearted.
My Reading Experience: Alison Rumfitt has chops. This book takes the beloved haunted house trope and unapologetically flips it on its head; rearranges all the furniture, and locks the reader inside it. You’ll feel like you’re back inside your house under COVID quarantine measures while you forget to even change your clothes or eat because you’re too busy doomscrolling your social media account feeds. An endless loop of tragedies that feel too horrible to be real. The height of modern facism. It’s all in here. Every bit of that ugliness. Remember feeling like you just couldn’t stomach one more thing? Just like one more hot take, one more fucking news story, one more twitter discourse, or “name and shame” was going to be the straw that broke your back? Did you break? I did.
It was like the world was a hornets nest being poked at with sticks.
It’s a painful experience! And while it would have been easier on me to tap out and move on to other horrors that don’t feel as abrasive, I chose this book to read during the transrightsreadathon. Giving up on a book written by a trans author about the trans experience, facisim, and transphobia wasn’t an option for me so I dug in and let this story haunt me all the way through and it did. Unrelentingly.
‘Sometimes, at the end of everything, the only option you have is to make it worse.’
Graphic depictions of gore, violence and sexual abuse indulgently act as the primary vehicles to drive the escalation of horror forward. The character work is good, Alice, Ila, and Hannah feel like fully formed people while at the same time, symbolic. I’ll admit, transgressive works of fiction fly over my head sometimes and this book made me feel confused. It’s riddled with terrible ideologies, antisemitism, racism, populism, I mean…you name it, it comes up in here. The House is a whole *other* character I forgot to mention. There is a story to follow here, Tell Me I’m Worthless has a plot and it’s there in the synopsis for you but honestly, it’s more than that because this book feels personal and it’s going to hit you different than it will anyone else, you’ll have to just decide if you’re ready for that. For me, my mind and body were ready, but my heart was resistant. It really did hurt too much.
Final Recommendation: Unflinching, unapologetic, unrelenting haunted house story where the people don’t go into an abandoned house and find out that it’s haunted, the house goes into you and haunts you from the inside. I’m not even sure after it gets in there, you can get it to leave. I can't say I enjoyed reading this book but I respect it.
Comps: No comps.
https://bookshop.org/a/7576/978125086...
Release Date: January 17th, 2023
General Genre/BISAC Categories: Adult Horror, Occult & Supernatural, LBTQIA2S+
Subgenre/Themes: Haunted House, Human Monsters, Mind Bender, Friendships, Fascism, Trauma, Transgender Experience
Writing Style: Abstract, Experimental, Multiple POV
What You Need to Know: You need to know how tragically bleak and dark this book feels while you’re reading it. Seriously, I recommend a good check-in with yourself before you pick it up to make sure you’re in a strong mental headspace before you take this journey with Rumfitt. There were several times where I just had to set it down and get into something lighthearted.
My Reading Experience: Alison Rumfitt has chops. This book takes the beloved haunted house trope and unapologetically flips it on its head; rearranges all the furniture, and locks the reader inside it. You’ll feel like you’re back inside your house under COVID quarantine measures while you forget to even change your clothes or eat because you’re too busy doomscrolling your social media account feeds. An endless loop of tragedies that feel too horrible to be real. The height of modern facism. It’s all in here. Every bit of that ugliness. Remember feeling like you just couldn’t stomach one more thing? Just like one more hot take, one more fucking news story, one more twitter discourse, or “name and shame” was going to be the straw that broke your back? Did you break? I did.
It was like the world was a hornets nest being poked at with sticks.
It’s a painful experience! And while it would have been easier on me to tap out and move on to other horrors that don’t feel as abrasive, I chose this book to read during the transrightsreadathon. Giving up on a book written by a trans author about the trans experience, facisim, and transphobia wasn’t an option for me so I dug in and let this story haunt me all the way through and it did. Unrelentingly.
‘Sometimes, at the end of everything, the only option you have is to make it worse.’
Graphic depictions of gore, violence and sexual abuse indulgently act as the primary vehicles to drive the escalation of horror forward. The character work is good, Alice, Ila, and Hannah feel like fully formed people while at the same time, symbolic. I’ll admit, transgressive works of fiction fly over my head sometimes and this book made me feel confused. It’s riddled with terrible ideologies, antisemitism, racism, populism, I mean…you name it, it comes up in here. The House is a whole *other* character I forgot to mention. There is a story to follow here, Tell Me I’m Worthless has a plot and it’s there in the synopsis for you but honestly, it’s more than that because this book feels personal and it’s going to hit you different than it will anyone else, you’ll have to just decide if you’re ready for that. For me, my mind and body were ready, but my heart was resistant. It really did hurt too much.
Final Recommendation: Unflinching, unapologetic, unrelenting haunted house story where the people don’t go into an abandoned house and find out that it’s haunted, the house goes into you and haunts you from the inside. I’m not even sure after it gets in there, you can get it to leave. I can't say I enjoyed reading this book but I respect it.
Comps: No comps.
August 9, 2021
Of all the haunted house novels to attempt to take the bull of Anglo-Saxon imperialism and its countless repulsive offshoots and tributaries by the horns, TELL ME I'M WORTHLESS is both the most sickening and the most successful. The house is the self and the self is the house and all of it is rotted to the core. Essential reading.
December 24, 2022
When I receive promotional information from Tor Nightfire, I always read it. With the ARC of TELL ME I'M WORTHLESS, I received a "note from the author," in which it states, and I quote "If you are expecting a conventional horror novel, I believe you are about to f**k around and find out." Them there are fighting words and I was up to the challenge! When my reading schedule fell behind, I opted to request the audio, and Macmillan was kind enough to allow me to download this story so I could listen instead, and what a tale it was!
This is the story of Ila, Alice, Hanna and a house. It's a story of manipulated and/or faulty memory, it's a story about transgender people, it's a story about fascism and most importantly to me, it's the story of a haunted house.
The story and history of transgender people is often a violent one. It's a story about how hatred tears down empathy bit by bit, and makes the entire world a colder place. All of that made for a decent story, but what I was really interested in was the house. In this tale, finally, I read a plausible reason for a house to be haunted, which was impressive. Often it's the denouement of haunted house tales that ruin it for me. The reasons are often stupid and just not believable. In this case, the reason seemed plausible and downright frightening. The only problem is that the house didn't play a big enough part in the story for me.
I appreciate how Splatterpunk is often described as violent and gory with a counter-cultural aspect, but in this case that aspect almost overwhelms the story. I appreciate and recognize racism in all of its ugly and various forms and I recognize that the messages here are important. But as a seasoned horror lover, I just wanted MORE HOUSE.
The narrator, Nicky Endres, is freaking amazing. All kinds of accents and moods, whatever was going on in the story, Nicky brought it to life and did it with panache. I especially enjoyed the narrations by the house and the voicing she used for that. (In fact, those portions were my absolute favorites, not just for the narration, but for how the house was presented and its story told.)
As you may have guessed by now, this is a transgressive book. It's violent, at times gory and at all times, it's in your face. As such, there are trigger warnings and if you do experience triggers you might want to read those first. Trauma and fascism are the main things this book addresses, as stated by the author herself at the beginning, so please DO check those warnings first.
Lastly, I wanted to mention that I loved the references to other books, most especially THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE. Since it's among my all time favorites, I love when other authors give it a shout out and that happens quite often here.
Overall, this is a solid debut effort with a social message. It's also an awesome haunted house tale, albeit one that I wanted to read more about. How about it, Alison? Let's f**k around and find out!
Sign me up for whatever Alison Rumfitt does next, because I think I got in on the ground floor of an author to watch!
*Thank you to NetGalley, Macmillan Audio and the author for the ARCS which were provided in exchange for my honest feedback. This is it!*
This is the story of Ila, Alice, Hanna and a house. It's a story of manipulated and/or faulty memory, it's a story about transgender people, it's a story about fascism and most importantly to me, it's the story of a haunted house.
The story and history of transgender people is often a violent one. It's a story about how hatred tears down empathy bit by bit, and makes the entire world a colder place. All of that made for a decent story, but what I was really interested in was the house. In this tale, finally, I read a plausible reason for a house to be haunted, which was impressive. Often it's the denouement of haunted house tales that ruin it for me. The reasons are often stupid and just not believable. In this case, the reason seemed plausible and downright frightening. The only problem is that the house didn't play a big enough part in the story for me.
I appreciate how Splatterpunk is often described as violent and gory with a counter-cultural aspect, but in this case that aspect almost overwhelms the story. I appreciate and recognize racism in all of its ugly and various forms and I recognize that the messages here are important. But as a seasoned horror lover, I just wanted MORE HOUSE.
The narrator, Nicky Endres, is freaking amazing. All kinds of accents and moods, whatever was going on in the story, Nicky brought it to life and did it with panache. I especially enjoyed the narrations by the house and the voicing she used for that. (In fact, those portions were my absolute favorites, not just for the narration, but for how the house was presented and its story told.)
As you may have guessed by now, this is a transgressive book. It's violent, at times gory and at all times, it's in your face. As such, there are trigger warnings and if you do experience triggers you might want to read those first. Trauma and fascism are the main things this book addresses, as stated by the author herself at the beginning, so please DO check those warnings first.
Lastly, I wanted to mention that I loved the references to other books, most especially THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE. Since it's among my all time favorites, I love when other authors give it a shout out and that happens quite often here.
Overall, this is a solid debut effort with a social message. It's also an awesome haunted house tale, albeit one that I wanted to read more about. How about it, Alison? Let's f**k around and find out!
Sign me up for whatever Alison Rumfitt does next, because I think I got in on the ground floor of an author to watch!
*Thank you to NetGalley, Macmillan Audio and the author for the ARCS which were provided in exchange for my honest feedback. This is it!*
November 23, 2023
Tell Me I'm Worthless, originally publisher by Cipher Press in 2021, was rereleased on January 17, 2023 by Tor Nightfire and Macmillan Audio.
This story mainly follows Alice and Ila, close friends and part-time lovers, who have been estranged after a hallucinatory night spent in a haunted house. Their friend Hannah was there that night too, but she never made it out.
The Reader gets both Alice and Ila's perspectives, as well as a third perspective that I will let you discover for yourself.
I went into this expecting it to be a new take on a haunted house story and it is, but I wouldn't classify it as a haunted house story per se. Rumfitt does creatively use that beloved Horror trope to bring something completely new to the table within these pages though.
As a piece of Transgressive Horror, this story definitely gets high marks. For me, although I can appreciate the creativity and gut-punching social commentary, I can't say this was a highly enjoyable reading experience for me.
Please note, I am not remarking on the skill or creativity of the author when I say that, I just feel like this story wasn't particularly suited to my reading tastes.
I could have used a bit more of a linear plot and a stronger atmosphere, as that is one of the main things I look for. There was a lot of great character work here and topical commentary, but there were also a lot of fever dream-type, internal monologue rants that sort of lost me.
Additionally, I found some of it a little hard to track. With this being said, I still appreciate all that Rumfitt poured into this story and the stark, in-your-face, take-no-prisoners feel of it all.
I would definitely pick up more of Rumfitt's work.
Thank you to the publisher, Tor Nightfire and Macmillan Audio, for providing me copies to read and review. I would recommend the audiobook as a medium for this.
They did some really unique sound work for a few of the intense horror scenes. It's definitely worth checking out.
This story mainly follows Alice and Ila, close friends and part-time lovers, who have been estranged after a hallucinatory night spent in a haunted house. Their friend Hannah was there that night too, but she never made it out.
The Reader gets both Alice and Ila's perspectives, as well as a third perspective that I will let you discover for yourself.
I went into this expecting it to be a new take on a haunted house story and it is, but I wouldn't classify it as a haunted house story per se. Rumfitt does creatively use that beloved Horror trope to bring something completely new to the table within these pages though.
As a piece of Transgressive Horror, this story definitely gets high marks. For me, although I can appreciate the creativity and gut-punching social commentary, I can't say this was a highly enjoyable reading experience for me.
Please note, I am not remarking on the skill or creativity of the author when I say that, I just feel like this story wasn't particularly suited to my reading tastes.
I could have used a bit more of a linear plot and a stronger atmosphere, as that is one of the main things I look for. There was a lot of great character work here and topical commentary, but there were also a lot of fever dream-type, internal monologue rants that sort of lost me.
Additionally, I found some of it a little hard to track. With this being said, I still appreciate all that Rumfitt poured into this story and the stark, in-your-face, take-no-prisoners feel of it all.
I would definitely pick up more of Rumfitt's work.
Thank you to the publisher, Tor Nightfire and Macmillan Audio, for providing me copies to read and review. I would recommend the audiobook as a medium for this.
They did some really unique sound work for a few of the intense horror scenes. It's definitely worth checking out.
February 1, 2022
I just didn't vibe with this at all.
ETA: The more I think about this the more I dislike it. It's not very well written and reads like something an "edgy" creative writing undergrad would write to shock their most conservative white male professor.
ETA: The more I think about this the more I dislike it. It's not very well written and reads like something an "edgy" creative writing undergrad would write to shock their most conservative white male professor.
November 21, 2023
Five stars because at worst the author achieved exactly what they were aiming for and at best they achieved considerably more. But this is a brutal novel and I regret reading it. I found too late that what I wanted from a haunted house story this fall was the bite of fear accompanied by a pleasant warmth. There is nothing warm here.
It is a great political novel because it is saying something about fascism and identity that couldn't have been said in any other form; something that cannot be summarized or explained. This could never have been an essay. It had to be a novel. The more you think about it, the more any obvious contemporary or straightforwardly liberatory interpretation seems to recede over a swiftly tilting horizon.
It is a great political novel because it is saying something about fascism and identity that couldn't have been said in any other form; something that cannot be summarized or explained. This could never have been an essay. It had to be a novel. The more you think about it, the more any obvious contemporary or straightforwardly liberatory interpretation seems to recede over a swiftly tilting horizon.
November 17, 2021
Maybe I’m not internet enough for this book?
I hated the writing. One short, declarative sentence after another. The language felt clumsy, full of cliches, tautology, ambiguity and a violence that quickly became tiresome. The dialog was cringeworthy - fortunately there was barely any of it. If there was any dramatic tension, it flew by me and the suspense was also missing due to the whole narrative being described on the blurb.
I can’t work out why the story has to be built so much on the bodies of nameless women. Like, why were no men harmed in the making of this book?
I hated the writing. One short, declarative sentence after another. The language felt clumsy, full of cliches, tautology, ambiguity and a violence that quickly became tiresome. The dialog was cringeworthy - fortunately there was barely any of it. If there was any dramatic tension, it flew by me and the suspense was also missing due to the whole narrative being described on the blurb.
I can’t work out why the story has to be built so much on the bodies of nameless women. Like, why were no men harmed in the making of this book?
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March 26, 2023“They were your eyes — weren’t they, House?”
Random comprehensive thoughts because I don’t know where or who I am rn help (mild spoilers):
I had to pause listening to this book several times to open this app and re-read the book’s description because I kept thinking wait - what am I reading again?
I really hate rape as a horror trope. I really really hate nazis and holocaust imagery as a horror trope.
I understand the commentary and a lot of it is very relevant - especially when the author goes into what is happening in England and Italy as we speak.
Nicky Enders is an incredible narrator and I need everything they’ve ever read in my ears immediately! If you’re going to read this book please please please go the audio route. I BEG you.
I feel like there’s some commentary I’m not educated or qualified to speak on due to not having certain lived experiences or ancestral knowledge..but some things just rubbed me a way that felt a bit off and uncomfortable. Maybe I was just over sensitive due to all of the holocaust imagery. It just felt strange to me to invent a woman of color character who is Jewish just to have her being a violent terf, r*ped multiple times, possibly be a r*pist, and have holocaust imagery carved into her body, and it turns out he is actually a trans man. Then to hear Alice’s racist and classist thoughts as she still worshipped a morrissey shaped demon with its eyes blackened out. It was all dreadful. The author pulls herself out of her writing to let us know that she is not projecting herself into these character and that this is simply just happening as if she is the poetic reporter. This is the influence of the house..the haunting. It still was her writing invented from her mind.
Alison Rumfitt is an incredible author and really knows how to write a haunting that is felt through the pages. I hope to read something with less nazi and rape torture horror by her soon. By less I mean none, please.
I’m certainly going to be thinking about this book for a v long while.
Random comprehensive thoughts because I don’t know where or who I am rn help (mild spoilers):
I had to pause listening to this book several times to open this app and re-read the book’s description because I kept thinking wait - what am I reading again?
I really hate rape as a horror trope. I really really hate nazis and holocaust imagery as a horror trope.
I understand the commentary and a lot of it is very relevant - especially when the author goes into what is happening in England and Italy as we speak.
Nicky Enders is an incredible narrator and I need everything they’ve ever read in my ears immediately! If you’re going to read this book please please please go the audio route. I BEG you.
I feel like there’s some commentary I’m not educated or qualified to speak on due to not having certain lived experiences or ancestral knowledge..but some things just rubbed me a way that felt a bit off and uncomfortable. Maybe I was just over sensitive due to all of the holocaust imagery. It just felt strange to me to invent a woman of color character who is Jewish just to have her being a violent terf, r*ped multiple times, possibly be a r*pist, and have holocaust imagery carved into her body, and it turns out he is actually a trans man. Then to hear Alice’s racist and classist thoughts as she still worshipped a morrissey shaped demon with its eyes blackened out. It was all dreadful. The author pulls herself out of her writing to let us know that she is not projecting herself into these character and that this is simply just happening as if she is the poetic reporter. This is the influence of the house..the haunting. It still was her writing invented from her mind.
Alison Rumfitt is an incredible author and really knows how to write a haunting that is felt through the pages. I hope to read something with less nazi and rape torture horror by her soon. By less I mean none, please.
I’m certainly going to be thinking about this book for a v long while.
November 10, 2021
England, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within.
June 27, 2023
Okay, now this is experimental and scary! Alison Rumfitt tells the story of Alice, Ila, and Hannah, three friends whose lives are forever transformed by the experiences they make in an old, haunted house. Its name: Albion, which is an ancient name for Great Britain. So what we get is a story about the phsyical and mainly psychological damage a societal majority can impose on minorities, in this case a trans woman who is also haunted by queer-icon-turned-hatemonger Morrissey (Alice), a PoC with Israeali and Pakistani roots whom Albion has turned into a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, so a TERF (Ila), and Hannah, who disappears inside Albion.
The intricate story presents plot points that are extremely on-the-nose social criticism, but the horror rendition and the tension between the characters make the novel a real page turner. Much has been said how the book is rooted in classic horror, particularly The Haunting of Hill House, but I was mainly reminded of House of Leaves, a great experimental feat in which the house looks like a constant structure from the outside, but shapeshifts on the inside, messing with people who get disoriented and lost, while all looks swell as long as you don't step into the building. Rumfitt plays with similar ideas, and while in texts like The Fall of the House of Usher, the disintegrating house represents the disintegrating mental state of its inhabitants, Albion seems to disintegrate the minds of those who step into it, corrupting them through ideologies of fear and hate, two feelings that re-inforce each other. The hate becomes so strong, it turns into self-hatred (extra points for the extremely well done inclusion of digital self-harm).
Back to the plot level: The three women, outsiders for different reasons, break into (!) Albion to spend the night. Afterwards (and what exactly happened is the contested question that moves the plot), both the trans woman and the TERF are convinced that the other one abused them, while the third women just disappeared. Go figure. Now this is a smart metaphorical manner to illustrate anti-trans debates - and the novel is full of those details and ideas. A powerful, scary, and also angry atmosphere permeates the text, and while the whole thing feels like a textual explosion, in the end, it comes together quite nicely.
This is daring, interesting political literature, I want more of these books.
The intricate story presents plot points that are extremely on-the-nose social criticism, but the horror rendition and the tension between the characters make the novel a real page turner. Much has been said how the book is rooted in classic horror, particularly The Haunting of Hill House, but I was mainly reminded of House of Leaves, a great experimental feat in which the house looks like a constant structure from the outside, but shapeshifts on the inside, messing with people who get disoriented and lost, while all looks swell as long as you don't step into the building. Rumfitt plays with similar ideas, and while in texts like The Fall of the House of Usher, the disintegrating house represents the disintegrating mental state of its inhabitants, Albion seems to disintegrate the minds of those who step into it, corrupting them through ideologies of fear and hate, two feelings that re-inforce each other. The hate becomes so strong, it turns into self-hatred (extra points for the extremely well done inclusion of digital self-harm).
Back to the plot level: The three women, outsiders for different reasons, break into (!) Albion to spend the night. Afterwards (and what exactly happened is the contested question that moves the plot), both the trans woman and the TERF are convinced that the other one abused them, while the third women just disappeared. Go figure. Now this is a smart metaphorical manner to illustrate anti-trans debates - and the novel is full of those details and ideas. A powerful, scary, and also angry atmosphere permeates the text, and while the whole thing feels like a textual explosion, in the end, it comes together quite nicely.
This is daring, interesting political literature, I want more of these books.
November 15, 2021
Gripping from the first page, this a horror novel about Alice, a trans girl living in an unnamed English city, and her former friend, Ila. Alice and Ila stopped being friends after a traumatic night spent in an old house, and they continue to be haunted by spectres from that night. For the first quarter of this book, I was happy to be along for the ride, but as the story progressed, I became less and less convinced by it. The haunted house is a great metaphor for trauma, and Rumfitt writes her characters' response to that in a believable way, but in other areas I found this novel clumsy and polemical. I don't disagree with Rumfitt's points - fascism is bad, trans women are women - but her gruesome horror imagery doesn't bring her arguments alive for me, and she writes in a way that's totally lacking in subtlety or nuance. Instead this book feels chaotic, and very negative - Rumfitt gives a lot of space to fascist characters or to TERFs and gives them lots of room to express their opinions, in a way that feels insidious and unnecessary. The book ultimately seems to be saying that things will always get worse, and trauma will ultimately destroy our lives -- and that wasn't a narrative I wanted to read.
December 13, 2022
Tell Me I'm Worthless follows the lives of three young people and a traumatic thing that happened to the them when they went to squat a haunted house some time ago. They decide to go back there to get to the root of what happened since the recollections of their respective horrors vary and once there, they go through even more traumatic shit.
I haven't read such an honest, angry, bitterly funny, complex book in a long time, wow. I don't even know how to rate this, the story, the horrors, the writing was insane.
I haven't read such an honest, angry, bitterly funny, complex book in a long time, wow. I don't even know how to rate this, the story, the horrors, the writing was insane.
February 22, 2022
I sometimes get such terrible headaches that I find myself wishing that someone would volunteer to crush my skull with a rock and end my pain once and for all. Needlessly violent, I know. But the headaches are so oppressive that I absolutely can't function and something primal within me gets triggered.
I think we all have those moments when conditions that are internal or external to us cause our entire worldview to be flung outwards from an unstable centre, or we feel like our brains have turned into spinning tops. We lose solidity and are unsure of bodies. These hands, these breasts, these feet. Are they mine? Why do I see them floating about? No, I'm not high. I'm just detached from myself, my material existence seems to be a sham. If I close my eyes, will my hands just disappear altogether?
Fortunately for us, these moments are very brief and we snap out of them soon. Unfortunately for the characters in this book, it's all they ever feel. Uncertainty and hatred. So much hatred. Towards themselves and others. The thing about hatred is, it always is restless. It always finds an outlet.
I can see that the author was very inspired by Shirley Jackson (there are direct quotes) and that this book tries to offer the best of all horror worlds. But somehow, the haunted-house-is-a-living-breathing-character didn't work for me. Unlike with Jackson's haunted house, this one always seemed to have a clear agenda and victims. However, I really enjoyed the body-horror. But as far as horror is concerned, I don't know man, it just wasn't scary. Not in the conventional way at least. It was scary in the way fascism is scary. No jump scares, which is good. (Can a book even have jump scares?) But it was always trying to be in-your-face, over-the-top, scary. And that just made it not-scary. It was all just weird. Sometimes in a good way, but mostly in a confusion inducing way.
I think we all have those moments when conditions that are internal or external to us cause our entire worldview to be flung outwards from an unstable centre, or we feel like our brains have turned into spinning tops. We lose solidity and are unsure of bodies. These hands, these breasts, these feet. Are they mine? Why do I see them floating about? No, I'm not high. I'm just detached from myself, my material existence seems to be a sham. If I close my eyes, will my hands just disappear altogether?
Fortunately for us, these moments are very brief and we snap out of them soon. Unfortunately for the characters in this book, it's all they ever feel. Uncertainty and hatred. So much hatred. Towards themselves and others. The thing about hatred is, it always is restless. It always finds an outlet.
I can see that the author was very inspired by Shirley Jackson (there are direct quotes) and that this book tries to offer the best of all horror worlds. But somehow, the haunted-house-is-a-living-breathing-character didn't work for me. Unlike with Jackson's haunted house, this one always seemed to have a clear agenda and victims. However, I really enjoyed the body-horror. But as far as horror is concerned, I don't know man, it just wasn't scary. Not in the conventional way at least. It was scary in the way fascism is scary. No jump scares, which is good. (Can a book even have jump scares?) But it was always trying to be in-your-face, over-the-top, scary. And that just made it not-scary. It was all just weird. Sometimes in a good way, but mostly in a confusion inducing way.
October 14, 2023
Truly iconic, a new instant classic fit to stand among its queer horror predecessors like Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (which this novel smartly and brilliantly echoes throughout). Brutal, terrifying, gross, sexy, both subtle and explicit at the same time in its evisceration of fascism, racism, transphobia, and all the other rot it identifies in British society. A book I should probably reread as there is so much here to digest, but I'm not sure I have the stomach for it. A surprisingly moving ending for a horror novel filled with body horror and (internalized) hate.
March 29, 2022
This is the most crushingly Online thing I have ever read. I felt more Online reading it than I do when I'm actually Online.
February 12, 2024
A very challenging and uncomfortable read that I found to be thought provoking and edifying
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