The first thing you’ll notice when reading the blurbs for Last to Leave the Room is that every reader seems to think it’s a different genre. Isaac Fellman says it “reads like Shirley Jackson writing an episode of Severance.” Apparently, this is a technothriller sci-fi speculative gothic horror novel, which I can’t say I’ve ever seen applied to the same book before—I guess that’s why the publisher’s description calls it “genre-busting.” While I was initially skeptical, I soon realized this really is a book that has one foot in technothriller and one in gothic, which makes it a unique reading experience, one I wasn’t sure how I felt about for most of the book.
The premise of Last to Leave the Room is that Tamsin Rivers realizes that her basement is sinking—or, technically, it’s stretching. Everything looks the same, but its depth increases every day. Then, a door appears in the basement, and soon, her doppelgänger emerges from it. This is a sufficiently weird and thought-provoking description that it caught my attention, but it wasn’t done in the way I expected.
First off, Tamsin is a cut-throat corporate scientist working on some advanced communications technology, and most of the beginning of the book is spent filling us in on that. When she realizes that the entire city is sinking—and it may be because of her experiments—she knows that her basement is sinking faster than everywhere else, and it must be the key to figuring out why it’s happening. I love spatial horror stories like House of Leaves, but that ended up not really applying here. Tamsin approaches this strangeness with a rigorous scientific mind, lighting every inch of the basement and taking careful measurements and samples. The changes are strange, but they’re not unsettling—until her doppelgänger appears, of course.
Even then, this doesn’t necessarily feel like a horror novel. Her double is kind and obeys her unquestioningly, at least at first. It’s a confusing, dangerous situation for Tamsin, and she doesn’t treat her double very kindly, but the beginning of the book is mostly this tension between the inexplicable events happening to Tamsin and her scientific mindset. But then, it becomes obvious that her double seems to just be a better version of Tamsin: more put together. Better at cooking. More social. Soon, she’s slowly and gently beginning to take over her life.
As you’d expect from a gothic, the tension and foreboding gradually builds. Tamsin begins to have memory lapses more and more frequently—that’s one of the most unsettling things in horror to me—and she struggles to do anything other than obsessively study the door and basement, which raises her employers’ suspicions.
I have to include a content warning for one gruesome section involving someone’s eye. NO THANK YOU. There’s not a lot of gore in this book, but that was enough, for sure.
As for the sapphic content, there’s a reference to Tamsin being attracted to women early on in the story, and there is a queer relationship later, though I wouldn’t call it a romance. I loved Starling’s The Luminous Dead, and like in that novel, Last to Leave the Room has a compelling but not healthy queer relationship, but it’s not nearly as big a part of this story as it was in that one.
This wasn’t what I expected, and through most of the book, I wasn’t completely sold on it, but the last third took a turn that grabbed my attention. It’s an interesting exploration of identity, and I’m glad I stuck with it. Still, I wish this was a novella instead: I’d like to have had it start with the door opening, instead of with Tamsin in a business meeting, for instance.
This isn’t a new favourite, but I read it for a book club, and I can’t wait for the meeting: there are so many great jumping off points for discussion.
