Tell Me I'm Worthless (2021)
Premise: three years ago friends Alice, Ila and Hannah went to this reportedly haunted house, and then they found out it wasn’t just an urban legend. And they did find out hard, like, oh boy, their face was so red and also only two of them came back. And maybe coming back wasn’t the best, and…
Under 90 minutes? No, but I read it in just an afternoon.
Do they say the title? yes!
First thing I thought of:
(in a laudatory way, mind you)
Okay, more: What a cheerful book this was, a whole joyride from start to end. It was all laughs and jokes and uh yeah it was basically annihilation in book form. I’m saying this from a place of admiration, this was a book that made me feel really, really devastated. Alison Rumfitt is amazingly good at conveying horrifying stuff like dysphoria, transphobia, the constant presence of certain online communities… and of course the overwhelming and constant joy that it is to live under capitalism and seeing how fascism is slowly but surely coming back. And there is a really haunted house too, and…
A seriously, seriously good, unsettling book, a great ghost story with some super cool narrative devices here and there. And just like happened with Violent Faculties, I loved this one but at the same time I’m not sure who I can recommend it to.
A simple way to improve it: if anything a less jaded person than me would say that a few topics in the book are a bit unsubtle (that specific older terf character, for example). The thing is, if anything we’ve seen that “in real life” satire is completely dead and pieces of shit like terfs or fascists (but i repeat myself hur hur) are basically cartoonishly evil. Except, not in the Elmer Fudd way.
Trivia about the IMDb trivia Goodreads reviews:
I like that the reviews are basically either the lowest or max score possible, and the bad reviews are all complaining about the author being too online, her points being too “sjw” (I thought we didn’t care about that thing anymore) or being too uncomfortable. So, hey, good job, Ms Rumfitt!
