Tell Me I'm Worthless

by Alison Rumfitt Narrated by Nicky Endres

Overview

Alison Rumfitt's Tell Me I'm Worthless is a dark, unflinching haunted house story that confronts both supernatural and real-world horrors through the lens of the modern-day trans experience.

"Nicky Endres pulls out all the stops when performing this horror story about a haunted house and the shocking trauma it inflicts on three people...This is the stuff nightmares are made of..."- AudioFile Magazine (Earphones Award Winner)


"Narrator Nicky Endres narrates three distinct POVs (Alice, Ila, and the House), and her voice easily slithers between all three, demonstrating how the house dominates this story and the women's lives." - Library Journal

"Transfeminine actor Nicky Endres' narration is chilling throughout, as they voice the perspectives of Alice, Ila, and the house at an easy, relaxed pace. Their voice maintains a lulling and melodious sing-song quality, which acts in opposition to the horrors portrayed in the book." - Booklist

“A triumph of transgressive queer horror.” -Publishers Weekly, STARRED review
“Easily one of the strongest horror debuts in recent memory.” -Booklist, STARRED review

Three years ago, Alice spent one night in an abandoned house with her friends, Ila and Hannah. Since then, Alice's life has spiraled. She lives a haunted existence, selling videos of herself for money, going to parties she hates, drinking herself to sleep.

Memories of that night torment Alice, but when Ila asks her to return to the House, to go past the KEEP OUT sign and over the sick earth where teenagers dare each other to venture, Alice knows she must go.

Together, Alice and Ila must face the horrors that happened there, must pull themselves apart from the inside out, put their differences aside, and try to rescue Hannah, whom the House has chosen to make its own.

Cutting, disruptive, and darkly funny, Tell Me I'm Worthless is a vital work of trans fiction that examines the devastating effects of trauma and how fascism makes us destroy ourselves and each other.

“Ambitious, brutal, and brilliant.” -Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt

A Macmillan Audio production from Tor Nightfire.

Editorial Reviews

MAY 2023 - AudioFile

Nicky Endres pulls out all the stops when performing this horror story about a haunted house and the shocking trauma it inflicts on three people: trans woman Alice and her friends, Ila and Hannah. The remarkable British accent Endres assumes in their dialogue aligns with the British terms found in the text. Endres infuses insecurity and a feeling of worthlessness as Alice revisits memories, verbalizing her musings. Endres's androgynous character voicings swing widely from soft, whispery, and loving when Alice talks to Ila and Hannah to intense, growling, and threatening when the house-ghost attacks Hannah and reshapes her body into a hideous form. This is the stuff nightmares are made of, and the content warning at the beginning of the story should be heeded. S.D.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 10/24/2022

Rumfitt’s sharp and uncompromising debut explores queer identity, trauma, and the damage people cause one another amid an increasingly fascist society. Alice is a transgender camgirl in modern-day Britain whose life has grown ever more hopeless and claustrophobic after an incident at a haunted house three years before the start of the book. The horrific experience—which Alice shared with her former friends Ila, who’s since become wildly transphobic, and Hannah, who went into the house and never came out—has left Alice haunted by a pervasive, malevolent force that occasionally manifests itself as the racist lead singer of an ’80s pop band. When Ila contacts her again to suggest returning to the house and so closing the circle on their mutual trauma, Alice agrees—but will facing their fears really be enough to give the women their closure and push them toward forgiveness? Rumfitt swings for the fences with this inventive take on the haunted house novel, and she succeeds, maintaining the emotional core of the story even amid outrageous gore and graphic sexual violence. The impact of each escalating horror always lands in the reader’s heart, even if it first takes a detour through the stomach. Rumfitt has points to make but she manages to narrowly avoid didacticism, tying the many elements of this powerful horror story together in an impressive ending that offers no easy answers. The result is a triumph of transgressive queer horror. (Jan.)

From the Publisher

Alison is like the twisted daughter of Clive Barker and Shirley Jackson. Tell Me I’m Worthless is an intense read full of shocks and buckets of gore. It’s brilliant.” —Joe Hill, New York Times bestselling author

“A triumph of transgressive queer horror.” —Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

“Easily one of the strongest horror debuts in recent memory.” —Booklist, STARRED review

“A gripping, hallucinogenic haunted house novel as righteously angry as it is horrifying, Tell Me I'm Worthless unflinchingly lays bare the personal and cultural scars we wear, endure, and inflict.” —Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World and The Pallbearers Club

“A lush masterpiece. Each page crackles with unnerving texture and unsettling sensation, and I felt chewed and digested by the end. Albion is the scariest haunted house since Hill House.” —Hailey Piper, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth

“Chilling, bone-deep horror as humane as it is hideous. Tell Me I’m Worthless is ambitious, brutal, and brilliant.” —Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt

“An utterly harrowing experience. Like all iconic masterworks of horror fiction, Tell Me I'm Worthless rips you apart and then tenderly pieces you together until you're something entirely new.” —Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

“A state-of-the-nation howl hidden inside a horror story. The phrase “novel for our time” is overused, but in this case, it’s entirely valid.” —Esquire

“Horrifying, provocative, and empathetic yet unflinching.” —Vulture

“A hallucinogenic, powerful, transgressive novel that uncompromisingly goes into uncomfortable territory and then wallows there, digging deeper and deeper into the things that make us human, and eventually posits that love might be the way out of the things that trap us the hardest.” —Locus

“This amazing work of trans fiction about houses, hauntings, and horrors is going to be the horror book everyone is discussing next year.” —Book Riot

“Intense…Rumfitt uses body horror and the tropes of the haunted house skillfully to explore the trans experience in an England full of terfs.” —CrimeReads

“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

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

“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

“Punk in every sense of the word, this is a debut unlike anything you’ve read before. Rumfitt’s horrifying talent shrieks out from every page and rings in your ears for days.” —Eliza Clark, author of Boy Parts

“The most startlingly original haunted house story I have read, this is intense, multi-layered and very, very creepy.” —Lucie McKnight Hardy, author of Water Shall Refuse Them

“Gripping, unsettling, compulsive, spicy, and, in the end, deeply moving. I loved it.” —Molly Smith, co-author of Revolting Prostitutes

“An exquisitely terrifying journey.... Alison Rumfitt’s astute observations of today’s violent cultural landscape work only too well as a tale of gothic horror. But Tell Me I’m Worthless is also full of beauty, empathy and, ultimately, love. I’ll never forget this book.” —Frankie Miren, author of The Service

“A deeply affecting and sharp-eyed book, Tell Me I’m Worthless collages and distorts the horror genre to create something truly unique, vastly compelling and very, very frightening.” —Alice Ash, author of Paradise Block

“Alison Rumfitt’s superlative trans horror picks a fight with the poisonous state of modernity and fearlessly attacks it head on. Vital, thrilling, utterly alive.” —Gary Budden, author of London Incognita

Library Journal

10/01/2022

DEBUT Best friends Alice, Ila, and Hannah decided to celebrate their final days of university by spending a night in the local haunted house. Three years later, Alice and Ila are living apart and dealing with the consequences of that night, the physical and emotional scars, and their conflicting beliefs that the other one raped them. And there is the question of Hannah, who never made it out. Alice, a trans woman who is barely connected to the real world, is physically haunted by a poster on the wall of her flat, while Ila has turned her pain into a career as a "gender critical" activist. Meanwhile, the house looms over everything as it continues to stalk and terrify everyone. As Ila comes to realize that she loves and needs Alice, the two go back to the house to face their fears so that they can begin to live again. VERDICT This debut is a fantastic and disorienting take on the haunted house trope, but it is also a compelling and emotional story about trauma, fascism, and the hard truth of living an openly trans life in the 21st century.

MAY 2023 - AudioFile

Nicky Endres pulls out all the stops when performing this horror story about a haunted house and the shocking trauma it inflicts on three people: trans woman Alice and her friends, Ila and Hannah. The remarkable British accent Endres assumes in their dialogue aligns with the British terms found in the text. Endres infuses insecurity and a feeling of worthlessness as Alice revisits memories, verbalizing her musings. Endres's androgynous character voicings swing widely from soft, whispery, and loving when Alice talks to Ila and Hannah to intense, growling, and threatening when the house-ghost attacks Hannah and reshapes her body into a hideous form. This is the stuff nightmares are made of, and the content warning at the beginning of the story should be heeded. S.D.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175674294
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	01/17/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

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