Old Soul

A while back I did one of my posts where I callously judge books based solely on their covers and synopses for your entertainment. One of the books I gave a “will check out at some point” thumbs-up to was Susan Barker’s Old Soul, which happened to recently be available cheap in the Kindle daily deal. Let’s check it out.

As described in the above-linked post, this is a story about a mysterious, ageless woman—she goes by many names but her own narration simply calls her ‘the woman’ so I’ll stick with that—who has crossed paths with numerous people stretching back decades. Whenever she pops up she puts someone—typically a friend or loved one of the person recounting the tale—under her sinister influence; that person begins to act in alarming or scary ways before dying, by which point the woman is long gone.

The book is split between two perspectives. The first is our nominal protagonist Jake, who gets onto the woman’s trail via a chance encounter with the sister of one of her victims and realises that she might be the key to finding out what happened to his childhood best friend several years ago. Jake’s section of the book is essentially a collection of short stories with a framing narrative, as he works his way back through the chain of the woman’s appearances and hears the testimonies of the survivors left in her wake.

The other half of the book, alternating with the Jake chapters, is a present-day story from the woman’s own point of view, as she leads her next victim into the desert. Obviously, this ends up intersecting with Jake’s story for the book’s climax.

It’s probably not a spoiler to reveal that the woman is feeding off of her victims in some way in order to prolong her lifespan. That suggests that something vampiric is going on, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. What the woman actually is and how she ‘feeds’ is one of those things which is theoretically interesting, but only if you ignore how the book itself explains it.

By that I mean that the way the woman herself thinks of what she is and how her supernatural status works is very evocative and suggests the presence of a whole other dimension (literally) to the book’s world that’s only hinted at. The actual, concrete explanation behind what’s going on is supremely uninteresting, but there’s reason to doubt its veracity. It comes from a source who doesn’t seem to have any greater objective insight into the matter than the woman herself, and it’s telling that after several centuries of contact with the same powers the woman seems to come away from it with a very different interpretation. This may just be one character filtering the whole thing through his then-current religious convictions, which the woman shared at the time but seems to have shed between then and when we catch up with her.

That’s fine in and of itself. The idea of two people coming into contact with the supernatural and having diverging interpretations of what it is they’ve encountered is cool. I like otherworldy powers that don’t speak or explain themselves, and it reminds me of the way the cults in Silent Hill call the entities they conjure up “gods” but they don’t appear to be any such thing.

What’s less cool is that even allowing for this, the woman’s backstory, when we finally get it, just isn’t very interesting, which is a bit of a let-down given that finding out this information is the crux of Jake’s investigation. I ended up feeling like it would have been better to not find out exactly how old the woman is and what her real name was and how she came to be the way she is. None of that information has any actual bearing on Jake’s side of the story (or, really, the woman’s), so his detective work could have ended after gaining conclusive proof that she is actually the same person in all the victim stories and not a similar-looking relative, and that she really is killing her victims with some sort of supernatural power. (As it is, it feels like he accepts both of those points way too early and easily).

I was in two minds about the woman’s side of the book while reading it, and I still am now. On one hand, having these chapters from her perspective takes a lot of the mystery out of her, as we not only get enough information well before Jake does to figure out the basic gist of what’s going on, it also humanises her and her attempts to stay one step ahead of death in a way that takes a lot of the spook out of the story.

On the other hand, the woman’s chapters are the best-written and most gripping material in the book. The desert vibes are immaculate, there’s a palpable sense of eeriness to the whole thing that the victim stories often lack, and even if it does de-mystify her, the woman’s desperation to stave off death is very compelling. It’s far better executed than Stephen King’s “I am going to narrate from the villain’s point of view” sections, mainly because the woman isn’t a cackling cartoon character.

I came away from the book feeling like one of these two strands—Jake’s investigation and the woman’s present-day adventure—wasn’t initially part of the story but was later inserted into it, possibly to fill it out to novel length. The fact that they both reveal redundant information to the reader heightens this feeling greatly, as does the fact that the framing story of Jake’s half begins to disintegrate towards the end, with his chapters skimming past his actual investigative legwork in favour of delivering the victim testimonies.

Not that there’s actually much investigative legwork to skim past. Back in my Judging Books By Their Covers post I was attracted to the idea of a story about a guy who goes on a globetrotting adventure to track down a mysterious creepy person; I ended up severely disappointed in that regard, because that’s not really what the book is about. Most of the time, Jake listens to one of the survivor’s testimonies and it turns out the woman happens to have dropped a direct clue to her previous kill at some point, so he goes and finds that person, and they tell their story and it turns out she also dropped a clue when talking to them so… it’s not very satisfying.

Especially so because late in the book the story introduces an element that could have served as a backbone and clue repository for the entire investigation, in the form of some dark web evidence that the woman has been maintaining for (kind of hard to believe) personal reasons. But that only serves to lead Jake to the final link in the chain.

All of this, I feel, is caused by the root issue of the book splitting its focus. Jake’s investigation can’t be deeper because it would take up too much space, the woman’s present narrative can’t go too in depth or it will risk revealing information that Jake is going to discover later anyway (although as stated, it still does that). This tension comes to a head in the book’s ending, which I found extremely rushed and anticlimactic, the story deciding to put its chips down and pick a main character in a way that leaves the other narrator’s page-count feeling like a huge waste of time.

That leaves the individual victim testimonies to carry the book. They don’t manage to do that, but they’re quite good on their own merits. Each one introduces the characters involved, sets up their situation at the time of their encounter with the woman, and then gets on with the story in a commendaly fast-paced way, without ever feeling rushed. The voices of the different point of view characters feel distinct, and the book makes good use of different locations and decades to give them all flavourful atmospheres. Even though the woman’s ‘feeding’ method is the same each time, the specific effect it has on its victims varies pretty widely, so you never know exactly what’s going to happen.

The one episode that I felt fell down is the story about a man whose disabled daughter was killed by the woman. The ingredients are here for a great little short horror story—the father paints himself as devoted and loving, but it’s clear that he’s controlling and emotionally abusive, and there’s suggestions that something even worse might have been going on—but the book bungles it by overplaying its hand, making the man seem like a two-dimensional villain. It feels like the author had a lot of trouble putting herself into this character’s shoes, which on one hand is kind of fair—he’s deeply unpleasant—but on the other hand, if you’re going to try for this subtle unreliable narrator shtick then you need to be able to deliver the story in a way that seems like it could have authentically come from the unreliable narrator. Here, the dude lets the mask slip way too obviously for someone who’s supposed to be in deep denial over what a shithead he is.

(At least, it seems like he does. The individual stories are delivered in third person rather than first, which at times makes it difficult to tell how much of this information is actually being told directly to Jake and how much is only being conveyed to the reader).

Overall, reading this was a slow process of gradual disenchantment as it became apparent that what seemed to be a compelling mystery was actually a character study. That might have been okay, but the execution was too lacking to make up for the disappointment.