Today I want to take a deeper dive into one of the books I read for the Trans Rights Readathon the other week: Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt. This debut haunted house story came out in the U.S. earlier this year and showcases how examples of real-world horrors can be transformed and explored with nuance in fiction.
Tell Me I’m Worthless is about a house that is evil to its core, a house that attracts violence, feeds the worst in people, and then absorbs all of the horrible things that have been done inside it. Three years ago, Alice spent a night in that abandoned house with her two closest friends, Hannah and Ila. Hannah never made it out of that house, while Alice and Ila escaped but were never the same afterward. Ila went down the TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) pipeline, spending all of her time and energy writing thinkpieces, giving talks, and going to meetings about why women like her former best friend Alice are a danger to society and shouldn’t be allowed in women’s spaces. Alice sees ghosts creeping out of the walls at night, and tries to drown them in alcohol, drugs, and partying. Alice and Ila have starkly different memories of what happened that night, each believing the other responsible for unforgivable acts, but the one thing they can agree on is that they both abandoned Hannah, whose fate was far worse than anything either of them are going through now. When Ila begins to hear a voice beckoning her to return to the house, she and Alice must decide if they are ready to confront their past and discover the truth of what really happened that night. But can returning to the house really bring them peace, or is it only ever capable of violence and destruction?
Tell Me I’m Worthless is packed with literary references to other haunted house stories and works of Gothic literature. It most frequently alludes to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, creating pastiches of that novel’s famous opening lines (“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality…). Rumfitt changes the focus from sanity to compassion, describing the house in this book as “not compassionate,” an inevitable result of existing “under the conditions of absolute fascism.” Alice and Ila—and anyone else who spends time in the house—seem to become their least compassionate selves while under its influence. The other work that this book references in depth is Angela Carter’s short story “The Bloody Chamber,” from her collection of the same name. The house’s history resembles the “Bluebeard” folktale that “The Bloody Chamber” retells, providing a suitably gruesome origin story to explain some of the house’s malevolence. There’s also a subtle riff on another famous opening line—that of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and a brief discussion of allegorical readings of the ending of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This is definitely a book for book nerds, especially book nerds with a focus on horror and the Gothic.
This is also a book for readers who appreciate clever and stylistic prose. Tell Me I’m Worthless employs a number of unusual narrative techniques, one of which is a tendency to break the fourth wall and address the reader directly, usually to engage in metatextual discussions about the reader’s possible expectations about hauntings and the haunted house genre. The novel also plays with point of view. Though most of the book trades off between Alice and Ila’s perspectives, there are a few sections that are from the perspective of the house itself, as well as chapters that blend Alice and Ila’s point of view and blur the lines of perception and reality inside the house.
The novel has quite a few poignant one-liners, causing me to have to pause and figure out how to use the “bookmark” feature on my audiobooks for the first time—if I were reading this on my Kindle, I would have constantly been stopping to highlight lines that stood out. Most of these lines were about the nature of haunting and the various things it can be understood to be a metaphor for. One of Alice’s lines: “Maybe I am haunting myself” illustrates how trauma can be thought of as a haunting. The metaphor works in the opposite direction, as well, since most ghosts “are born from trauma and violence.” In this book, hauntings can take the form of a trauma response, but they can also manifest as slow corruption or outright possession, as seen when the spirit of the house takes control over the thoughts and actions of those inside it. As much as the house influences its inhabitants, however, it is also influenced by them. Early on in the book, Rumfitt establishes this premise with a description of how locations can absorb the energy of the people and events within them, which build up to establish a sort of genius loci—a spirit of the place: “Rooms sit and stew. They take in the things you do in them. Their walls soak up every action you take between them. And those actions become part of the bricks and plaster.”
Tell Me I’m Worthless packs a serious punch for a first novel. I look forward to seeing more innovative works of horror from Alison Rumfitt in the future. I do recommend checking out the content warnings for this book on StoryGraph before you read if there are subjects you’re sensitive to, though, as it deals with many heavy topics, sometimes in graphic detail. You can find Tell Me I’m Worthlesson shelves now in your favorite local retailer, or buy it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve already read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments below!