Tell Me I'm Worthless

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An important book, as transgressive and trans as they come.”— Isabel Waidner, author of Sterling Karat Gold and We Are Made of Diamond Stuff

Content warnings for: transphobia, anti-Semitism, racism, slur usage, graphic rape and attempted rape, violence, death Sign me up for whatever Alison Rumfitt does next, because I think I got in on the ground floor of an author to watch! As a piece of Transgressive Horror, this story definitely gets high marks. For me, although I can appreciate the creativity and gut-punching social commentary, I can't say this was a highly enjoyable reading experience for me.A sharp and visceral novel which bends the horror genre to its will. Tell Me I’m Worthless holds a gruesome mirror up to the way it feels to live now. I absolutely tore through this book” — Julia Armfield, author of Salt Slow and Our Wives Under the Sea The thing I enjoyed was getting into the headspace of someone who, if they met me on the street, would probably hate me. I was trying to build a psyche of someone like that and work out if there was a way that I could still empathise with them. It’s kind of telling that Ila doesn’t ever quite feel like she is with the gender critical movement all the way. I don’t know if I could have written an unrepentant TERF with no point of origin of their bigotry. It was an experiment but it was an experiment I really relished. When a transphobic woman bombs Frankie’s workplace, she blows up Frankie’s life with it. As the media descends like vultures, Frankie tries to cope with the carnage: binge-drinking, sleeping with strangers, pushing away her friends. Then, she meets Vanya. Mysterious, beautiful, terrifying Vanya. The highlights of Enriquez’s short story collection are many, but Adela’s House, a chilling story about a girl who disappears through an impossible door in a derelict house, stays with you, gnawing and nagging at your thoughts. Elsewhere, stories focus on horrific acts of violence against children or the spectres of serial killers, all while dealing obliquely with the real haunting of Buenos Aires by its military junta.

Tell Me I'm Worthless is a defiant love letter to the lost, reminding us that win or lose, live or die, we can still save our souls by choosing love.” —Maya Deane, author of Wrath Goddess Sing The choice of protagonists is one of the most potent experiments, as it seems controversial to give room to unmediated hatred against trans people whilst also having a trans protagonist. This book, though, has a willingness to dive into areas that other authors would likely be afraid to touch upon; it's hard to imagine them taking the risk of suggesting an even spread of sympathy. It is simply the case here that Rumfitt is not sympathetic to all ideas, but that she has a willingness to present the complexity of people: including the drives and behaviours that they mightn't even understand themselves. It's this humanistic approach gives the book room to dive into the pernicious forces that influence all of them. No live organism can continue to exist compassionately under conditions of absolute fascism, even the birds in Italy under Mussolini were observed to take part in rallies and violence. Albion, not compassionate, not sane, stood ringed by a tangled forest, holding inside, however messily, its overpowering ideology; it had stood so for a hundred years but would only stand for one more before it entered into the long process of becoming something else, at the end of which it was hoped it would seem to all the world that it had always been that way. Within, floors crumbled, ceilings gaped open, vines choked the chimneys and the windows. Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of the house, and whatever walked there marched on Rome.’ now for the plot, which can be summed up as 'what if hill house were actually powered by evil nazi ghosts' - or to put it specifically, the spirit of capitalist white

We meet Alison Rumfitt to hear about Tell Me I’m Worthless, her hyper-contemporary new novel connecting haunted houses and right-wing politics

At the very beginning of the audiobook, Alison Rumfitt informs the listener that the book is about two things: trauma and fascism. She apologizes to the listener for "letting them haunt this book." She goes on to specify a few triggers, like racism and rape, and identifies this opening section as her trigger warnings. She then apologizes for providing them (though how could they be anything but helpful to the concerned populations?) assuring the listener that the choice to include them is her own and not her publisher's. It is not lost on me that this apology is hugely and grossly ironic at the beginning of a terribly frightful and graphic horror tale about fascism. (Especially in light of the probability that she could have included gobs of other trigger warnings, as other reviewers have noted.)