A macabre quest for immortality: Old Soul, by Susan Barker, reviewed
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
