Review: Caitlin Starling’s Last to Leave the Room
Horror fans of the world, our time is approaching. Fall is here, and soon spooky season will be in full swing. I’m always on the hunt for new horror media in the fall, and if you’re like me in this regard, you’ll want to check out Caitlin Starling’s new book from St. Martin’s Press, Last to Leave the Room.
Set in the futuristic city of San Siroco, the novel follows the cold and calculating physicist Dr. Tamsin Rivers as she tries to find the cause of a mysterious disturbance plaguing the city — it is impossibly, quickly, sinking. But the problem becomes personal when a door appears in her basement, and through it walks a person who looks like her, talks like her, thinks like her, but can’t be her… can it? As the lines between the two Tamsins shift and blur, Starling asks us what it means to be human, and what you would be willing to sacrifice to leave your mark on the world.
Last to Leave the Room takes a second to get cooking, but once it does it simmers and sizzles like a very delicious and very spooky meal. It’s enthralling and horrific and often very difficult to put down. One of my favorite things about Starling’s novels is that even though all her works have sci-fi and fantasy settings, she always brings something of a gothic sensibility to her work. Be it ghosts in space, suspicious former marriages in a world with magic, or doppelgängers in the high tech future, the creeping dread calls to mind gothic tales from centuries past. It’s a mix that may seem strange, but it allows Starling to more effectively critique and unpack the genre’s tropes. No spoilers here, but Last to Leave the Room’s doppelgängers are more complicated than you may expect.
My favorite part of Starling’s new novel is the way she explores how the label of “human” can be weaponized and used as a method of othering. Different characters in the novel describe themselves and each other as being excluded from humanity, which in turn ties into and underscores the novel’s scenes of medical horror (another Starling staple). What can the labels “inhuman,” “other,” and “sick” allow us to do to one another? What are we doing when we limit our empathy and compassion to only those we decide fall under the umbrella of “humanity”? What would happen if we extended our empathy beyond those boundaries? What would we learn? What would we discover about ourselves, and about others?
These questions also tie into the novel’s representations of disability. Visible disabilities have, historically, often been used as a lazy shortcut to mark a character as evil or inhuman. Starling’s novel subverts this trope, primarily through the character of Lachlan, Tamsin’s dangerous and alluring minder. Without spoilers, Lachlan’s disability is what allows her to survive her encounter with the supernatural, and gives her the skills and empathy to aid Tamsin in a time of crisis. Again, Starling asserts that when we extend kindness towards those society labels as “inhuman,” we can make new connections and grow together.
Caitlin Starling’s Last to Leave the Room is a chilling, uncanny tale about humanity, inhumanity, and the cost of ambition. My favorite of her novels is still The Luminous Dead, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading her new novel, and loved the way it incorporated a broad and unexpected variety of themes while never taking its foot off the gas.
Last to Leave the Room is out October 10. Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for providing this eGally for review consideration.
