Old Soul by Susan Barker is a terrifying novel about a malevolent, otherworldly force that is transmitted to victims via a mysterious, shapeshifting woman over decades and centuries. I am not usually someone who finds supernatural themes all that convincingly scary, but Old Soul really got me.
As the jacket blurb states, Jake and Mariko meet by chance and discover that they have lost a friend and family member respectively. Both Lena (Jake’s friend) and Hiroji (Mariko’s twin brother) act erratically, cruelly, and dangerously after meeting a beguiling woman; they both eventually perish in horrific ways. This woman is the titular old soul of the novel–as Jake discovers by crisscrossing the globe and interviewing people whose loved ones have also suffered similar fates after meeting this woman. This woman–Damaris/Marion/Vera/whatever name she adopts–befriends and photographs the victims, forcing them to look at the photos. The force, called the Tyrant, infiltrates and possesses the victims. Barker’s description of these victims’ fate gave me nightmares last night:
She pulled her T-shirt up above her navel. She hadn’t been eating much, and below her ribs her flesh was sunken and concave. I wasn’t sure what she wanted to show me. Then I saw a sudden bulge moving under her skin. Like a rat, tunneling about in the stomach of a corpse.
I dropped the torch. I fumbled with it again, hands shaking, but couldn’t get the light to turn back on. In the dark Lena wasn’t visible under the workbench, but I could hear her. The faint gurgling in her throat, and something else, coming from inside her. a squelching sound. (181)
AHHH!
Barker’s novel is structured as a series of interviews Jake conducts with the loved ones left behind. These testimonies reveal the disastrous, traumatic wake that this woman leaves behind: as she sacrifices her victims, she also destroys everyone else’s lives even if she doesn’t directly or indirectly kill them. Barker intersperses these interviews with a third-person account of a woman and a young girl in the desert, deftly revealing as this account unfolds over the course of hours how it connects to Jake’s dogged quest to find and stop this woman.
Does he stop her? Can she be stopped? These are the questions that I kept me reading until 2AM this morning. If you can handle the existential terror that Barker beautifully describes, I recommend you find out for yourself.