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Old Soul
by
Susan Barker
general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author
| Title: | Old Soul |
| Author: | Susan Barker |
| Genre: | Novel |
| Written: | 2025 |
| Length: | 334 pages |
| Availability: | Old Soul - US |
| Old Soul - UK | |
| Old Soul - Canada | |
| Old Soul - Deutschland | |
| from: Bookshop.org (US) |
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Our Assessment:
B : the parts better than the whole, but satisfyingly concluded
See our review for fuller assessment.
| Source | Rating | Date | Reviewer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Publishers Weekly | . | 21/10/2024 | . |
From the Reviews:
- "(A) sweeping work of literary horror that spans the globe yet remains distinctly itchy beneath the skin. (...) The slow-burning tension and lush, atmospheric prose build a creeping sense of dread that lingers long after the final page." - Publishers Weekly
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
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The complete review's Review:
Old Soul is (practically) bookended by two chapters set in Taos County, the first brief one in 1982 and then a longer one set there forty years later.
(There is also then a short Epilogue, to fully finish things off.)
In between, readers are offered seven 'testimonies', collected and presented by Jake, who travels far and wide to gather them; between each of the testimonies is a chapter that turns to ongoing events in American badlands, the Bisti Wilderness in New Mexico.
The first testimony Jake presents comes from an encounter in Osaka, where he and a fellow-traveler, Mariko, both miss their flight and then have dinner together at the hotel she is staying at.
Mariko hasn't had a drink in nine years but they go to the hotel bar after dinner and she has some whiskey and she opens up about her past -- specifically, her twin brother Hiroji, who died eleven years earlier, in 2011 -- and some of what she tells Jake sounds all too familiar to him, reminding him of a close friend of his, Lena, who also died in 2011 -- "and she was saying similar things in the weeks before", like Hiroji.
Among the details that really stand out were, as Jake asked: "Were his internal organs the wrong way around ? Reversed ?" -- as both Hiroji and Lena were found to have situs inversus in death, a mirror-shift of the body's organs that is in fact a congenital condition but in these cases only happened when they were close to death.
There's also that presence of a mysterious elusive woman around them near their deaths .....
Jake notes that: "For eleven years, the circumstances around Lena's death had haunted and confounded me" -- but now he learns of similar circumstances, and while Mariko does not tell him more, she leaves him a phone number of someone who can, and soon he's tracking down other connections and similar cases.
As slowly becomes clear, there is a woman -- the old soul of the title -- who exerts unusual powers, and around whom there are terrible deaths.
They involve her taking or making a picture of the soon-to-be-victim which, when they look at it, seems to drive them to a kind of madness.
The Badlands-sections suggest more of her powers (and weaknesses), as they describe a woman -- clearly the mystery-woman of the other episodes, or someone very much like her -- who takes a young woman named Rosa into the badlands, wanting to photograph her and promising to help her on the path to stardom.
Ambitious, rosy-eyed Rosa is convinced of her bright future:
I'm manifesting a hundred thousand subs to the Aurora Rose channel by the end of the year. A millions subs the year after that. I want a number-one podcast, then my own Netflix show.The woman taking her for a ride doesn't seem to be in great physical shape; one suspects she wants to harvest Rose's youth in one way or another, as some of the other episodes also suggest. Her exact nature and needs and powers are only slowly revealed; however, she does admit to Rosa that she's ... a bit older than the thirty-five or so that Rosa guesses; indeed, that: "I am an old soul". As to dying, she explains to Rosa: "It's harder for me than most people" ..... Yes, life might be tough, but death apparently can be, too -- one of the more interesting angles of the ... situation at work here.
As one of those who offer their testimonies to Jake puts it regarding the mystery woman, who, over the decades always seems to be about the same age: "The more time I spend with her, the more unreal she is" -- and finds even: "She's hallucinatory. Only half-corporeal". But is the woman villain or victim ? More lurks beyond, as there's also mention of another dark presence a 'Tyrant' that seems to be involved in all this.
The longest testimony-chapter is the final one, by (female) sculptor Theo, and it is the relationship she had with the mystery-woman that ultimately ties the whole story together -- bringing also several of the characters who figure prominently along the way together in the dramatic final confrontations and the novel's breathless resolution.
At one point during their relationship, Theo wondered to herself: "Does it matter who or what she is ?" and this is also part of the tension of the novel -- is the supernatural hooey the essence of the story, or is it merely some underpinning for an exploration of other issues, of human ambitions, passions, longings, and fate. So also, there's a Mephistophelean streak to the novel, with Barker long teasing with the question(s) of what deal was made with what devil, and how that manifests itself.
The individual chapters offer solid and sometimes very good horror, and Barker tells the various stories well, but having so many different episodes and experiences keeps pulling away from really developing the core. Sometime-narrator Jack is also a somewhat underdeveloped character, especially given his central role, and his far-flung travels collecting the testimonies feels a bit contrived, as the depths of his obsession with learning what happened to Lena also doesn't fully convince -- perhaps also because it takes so long before we get the details of her fate. Jake himself admits, halfway through the novel, that: "every time I sit down to write what happened to Lena, I freeze. I can't construct a narrative" -- which admittedly is reflected well in the novel, but also makes it somewhat less compelling. Rosa, too, is long a too-simple figure -- though generally Barker is good on and with character; it's also just that there are so many of them in the book.
The resolution is quite satisfactory -- probably not what readers were expecting, which is always welcome in a suspense-novel -- but the crowding of the novel -- so many people are affected by events -- dilutes the impact of the horror and the whole. If somewhat uneven -- again, juggling so many characters and fates --, Old Soul mostly reads well and is reasonably engaging, and there are interesting dynamics at work throughout, but the central, somewhat convoluted horror and its various details (the whole situs inversus twist, for example; the transit of Venus comes into play as well) doesn't have quite the force and impact that it should. (The ending leaves for (tighter and more focused) sequel-potential, and it would be interesting to see where Barker would take it -- though presumably readers are meant to simply (loosely) imagine what follows on their own by it.)
- M.A.Orthofer, 17 January 2025
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Old Soul:
- G.P. Putnam's Sons publicity page
- Fig Tree publicity page
- Suhrkamp Verlag publicity page
- See Index of Contemporary British fiction
- See Index of Mysteries and Thrillers
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British author Susan Barker was born in 1978.
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© 2025 the complete review
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