Publisher: Penguin
Publication Date: February 2025
Currently I am taking part in my local library’s ‘Book Bingo’ challenge for 2025. One of the categories within the challenge, to read 12 books over 12 months, is to read a book from a genre I would never normally read. Susan Barker’s book ‘Old Soul’ definitely fits that description as ‘horror’ is not something that I would normally gravitate towards. I had, however, heard several recommendations for this book along with praise for Susan Barker’s previous novel ‘The Incarnations’; it had also been listed as ‘literary fiction’ and so I decided I would read her latest novel.
In short, this book is unlike anything I have ever read! The book opens through a chance meeting between Jake and Mariko at an airport. What initially felt like a romance gone wrong, turned into something completely different. Over the course of an evening the pair discover that they have a grisly connection. Namely Mariko’s twin brother and Jake’s friend died in the same brutal and mysterious way and both have been traumatised by the nature of their loved ones particular death. The novel’s narrative then splits to a ‘real time’ encounter between Rosa, a twenty something social media influencer and the mysterious woman who we realise is the individual connecting Jake and Mariko’s narratives. We then span across different time and places, different people and with different narratives but come to realise that despite these differences the thing connecting them is this particular woman. She has different names and different looks; however, she remains the constant and she means real harm.
It was a deeply unsettling book, intensified by the woman’s present ritual with Rosa being interspersed between stories of previous individuals whose lives she had changed and destroyed irrevocably. To be this close to the ‘old soul’ and having your knowledge grow of their misdeeds added a real tension to this story as we know Rosa’s fate is not going to be a happy one, we become complicit in the process. We as readers, along with Jake want to work out if there is a way to make it stop or at least find out how this woman came to be. Every time we meet a new character and begin a new story there is the same fatal inevitability and impending doom that fills the pages and we feel powerless to stop it.
Once we reach the end of the story, in what feels like a climactic horror movie moment, a lot of questions remain. It did not feel as cathartic as I had hoped but perhaps that is the point. This novel does not provide much comfort and at times is particularly grisly. It was, for me, a really unique reading experience and one that I will not forget for a long time.
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