Susan Barker’s Old Soul opens with pages from a diary: ‘T’ records a late-night conversation with a woman known as ‘E’ as they watch Venus rise. While they talk, we learn that Venus ‘spins slowly, at the pace of a walking man’, so one day is longer than a year. E imagines she is there, walking towards a sun that never sets. When T says that sounds lonely, E is adamant it wouldn’t be.
This strange fragment sets the tone for a sinister horror story in which one woman – who goes by many names but is often simply ‘the woman’ – has an unnaturally prolonged life, serving an entity she calls the Tyrant, who has an appetite for human sacrifice and a taste for lost souls.
Old Soul braids two narrative strands to create a plot that spans centuries and continents but also takes place with propulsive urgency in the present day. One follows Jake, a primary school teacher trying to understand how his friend Lena died with her organs inexplicably reversed. ‘She’d been so alone,’ he recalls. ‘I doubted anyone ever thought of Lena any more, other than me.’ At Kansai airport, in Osaka Bay, he meets a woman who tells an eerily similar story about her estranged twin brother: the night he died, he called her to say he had ‘entered the mind of a higher dimensional god’, who had rearranged his organs so ‘they weren’t his any more’. By following leads from one victim to another, Jake uncovers more cases across the world, recording witness testimonies as he goes.
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