Tell Me I'm Worthless
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3.9 • 16 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless is a dark, unflinching haunted house story that confronts both supernatural and real-world horrors through the lens of the modern-day trans experience.
“Alison is like the twisted daughter of Clive Barker and Shirley Jackson. Tell Me I’m Worthless is an intense read full of shocks and buckets of gore. It’s brilliant.” —Joe Hill, New York Times bestselling author
A Best Horror Book of the Year (Esquire, Book Riot, ) • A Most Anticipated Book of the Year (CrimeReads, Vulture, Goodreads, Paste)
“A triumph of transgressive queer horror.” —Publishers Weekly, STARRED review
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.
Cutting, disruptive, and darkly funny, Tell Me I’m Worthless is a vital work of trans fiction that examines the devastating effects of trauma and how fascism makes us destroy ourselves and each other.
“Easily one of the strongest horror debuts in recent memory.” —Booklist, STARRED review
Also by Alison Rumfitt:
Brainwyrms
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
We were astonished by this uniquely disturbing novel. Three young British women, Alice, Ila, and Hannah, decide to mark the end of a special era in their lives by spending a night in a local house rumored to be haunted, with tragic results. Three years later, a haunted and desperate Alice wants to return to see if she can save her former friends and herself. Trans author Alison Rumfitt has written a powerful and transgressive fable about living in a country that’s decided you shouldn’t exist, and she’s defiantly unsubtle about it. (One of the spirits haunting Alice is Smiths-era Morrissey, a queer icon later turned right-wing reactionary.) Rumfitt artfully blends the eerie and ghastly with the hard-edged realism of being a trans woman in an anti-trans world. A wildly unsettling story full of intimate body horror, Tell Me I’m Worthless is simply devastating.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rumfitt's sharp and uncompromising debut explores queer identity, trauma, and the damage people cause one another amid an increasingly fascist society. Alice is a transgender camgirl in modern-day Britain whose life has grown ever more hopeless and claustrophobic after an incident at a haunted house three years before the start of the book. The horrific experience—which Alice shared with her former friends Ila, who's since become wildly transphobic, and Hannah, who went into the house and never came out—has left Alice haunted by a pervasive, malevolent force that occasionally manifests itself as the racist lead singer of an '80s pop band. When Ila contacts her again to suggest returning to the house and so closing the circle on their mutual trauma, Alice agrees—but will facing their fears really be enough to give the women their closure and push them toward forgiveness? Rumfitt swings for the fences with this inventive take on the haunted house novel, and she succeeds, maintaining the emotional core of the story even amid outrageous gore and graphic sexual violence. The impact of each escalating horror always lands in the reader's heart, even if it first takes a detour through the stomach. Rumfitt has points to make but she manages to narrowly avoid didacticism, tying the many elements of this powerful horror story together in an impressive ending that offers no easy answers. The result is a triumph of transgressive queer horror.
