Last to Leave the Room
Ratings14
Average rating3.5
Last to Leave the Room is a new novel of genre-busting speculative horror from Caitlin Starling, the acclaimed author of The Death of Jane Lawrence. The city of San Siroco is sinking. The basement of Dr. Tamsin Rivers, the arrogant, selfish head of the research team assigned to find the source of the subsidence, is sinking faster. As Tamsin grows obsessed with the distorting dimensions of the room at the bottom of the stairs, she finds a door that didn’t exist before - and one night, it opens to reveal an exact physical copy of her. This doppelgänger is sweet and biddable where Tamsin is calculating and cruel. It appears fully, terribly human, passing every test Tamsin can devise. But the longer the double exists, the more Tamsin begins to forget pieces of her life, to lose track of time, to grow terrified of the outside world. As her employer grows increasingly suspicious, Tamsin must try to hold herself together long enough to figure out what her double wants from her, and just where the mysterious door leads...
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This one has mixed reviews, but as a Sci-Fi fan, I really enjoyed it. The idea of a doppelganger, just popping into existence, is a favorite trope for me. Last to Leave the Room does this well, I think, and it made for a good story.
There is a lot of contemplation, especially towards the end, but that actually made this more interesting for me. Sometimes it works, and sometimes not, but this time it fit well.
If you're a fan of Sci-Fi, with a touch of horror, this is one to grab and read. I sincerely appreciate St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for the review copy. All opinions expressed are my own.
The premise of this book was very intriguing. A researcher at an experimental communications lab realizes her city is facing a crisis that defies the laws of physics- and that might be connected to her work. When a duplicate of herself suddenly appears, she struggles to balance between saving the city and satisfying her need to know what is happening regarding herself and her double.
My main issue with the text was the amount of time it took me to feel invested in the characters and plot. While the second half was much more compelling, the first half of the text seemed to drag for me.
Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for a fair review:
I love Caitlin Starling's horror novels, because I love her pacing. She starts as close to the action as possible, and only includes details relevant to the plot. Both The Luminous Dead and The Death of Jane Lawrence are strong yet lean novels. I'm never bored, and I have trouble putting them down.
So I was a little disappointed when I got five chapters into Last to Leave the Room and found myself bored. Nothing's perfect, though, so I kept going to chapter 15, where I felt like things were finally happening. They weren't. I'll be honest, if I hadn't gotten this book off NetGalley, I may not have finished it.
The thing that makes Starling's books work, for me, is the relentless focus on necessary detail combined with cutting the wheat from the chaff. I never feel like things haven't progressed in a chapter, like things aren't developing. Yet that's a huge problem in Last to Leave the Room. Once the delicious joy of reading Tamsin's neuroses wears off, there's a lot of detail I just don't care about, and the detail I do care about is spread thin with incremental development. I never cared about the node project Tamsin was working on, perhaps because there's precious little detail about it in the actual novel. It's a thing that Tamsin has to deal with to justify her deteriorating mental state, but it's very vague within the novel. Maybe I missed something, but considering how lush with detail The Death of Jane Lawrence is with medical gore and The Luminous Dead is with cave diving, I doubt it. This book ultimately feels like it was originally a novella that publishers wanted stretched out to novel length. In the end, it feels boring and empty, which is the exact opposite of what I go to for a Caitlin Starling novel.
That said, I think it is of great interest to anyone who really, really enjoys unreliable narrator POV, especially when that POV is a very ‘problematic' woman. That just wasn't enough for me, personally, to make the book shine.
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