Tell Me I'm Worthless

Starred review from October 24, 2022
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.

November 1, 2022
Rumfitt's debut dives into the "haunted house" of present-day fascist Britain. Two former friends and lovers--a trans woman named Alice, and her ex-turned-TERF Ila--are both haunted by the events that happened to them and their mutual friend Hannah in the House. The House is a horrifying, hateful structure steeped in all of the fascism lurking in the heart of the British Empire, at the center of which is the red room that destroyed Hannah and twisted Alice's and Ila's friendship and their lives. Rumfitt's narrative mixes haunted house horror with an experimental style that leaps back and forth in time, diving into the darkest pits not only of its characters but of Britain and the present as a whole. Rumfitt's prose style lies somewhere between Clive Barker or Shirley Jackson on one hand and Dennis Cooper or the New Narrative writers on the other and manages to cut to the heart of sickening ideologies without feeling trite or glib in its depictions of misery. Easily one of the strongest horror debuts in recent memory, and essential reading not only for anyone interested in horror writing, but for anyone interested in, for want of a better term, the ""trans novel.

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