Last to Leave the Room

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.