A queer haunting story as much about the trans experience as about the things we survive.


...not one of my favorites as I didn't necessarily find it to be frightening in the way I'd hoped. The story is tied up in fascism, the trans experience in the UK, in a certain lens of queerness that felt somewhat alien to me even as a non-binary person.

I think it just wasn't the story I'd been hoping to read, and thus it didn't hit as hard as it might have otherwise.

Not a bad read, just not what I'd expected.

This book has trigger warnings for graphic content and abuse. I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about it. It wasn’t what I thought it was gonna be and I didn’t particularly enjoy it.

Three years ago Alice and her friends spent the night in a haunted house. Of the three of them who went in only Alice and her friend lla made it out. From that moment on her life has not been the same. The memories of that night haunt Alice and traumatize her to the point where she feels like the only way to be free is return to the place where it all happened. Alice and her friends make their way back to the house to release what’s been plaguing them and save their friend Hannah from the clutches to the house.

Tell Me I’m Worthless is available January 17,2023.

Thank you netgalley and macmilliantorforg for this arc in exchange for my honest review.

This was a tough one for me. It was one that I wanted to like so much more than I did.

The author is trans and the overarching themes of the book deal with trans issues, identity, and (of course) the political and social climate of those issues. It’s also the story of a very evil house.

Oh, I wanted so much more of the very evil house.

While I am 1000% a trans and LGBTQ ally, I wanted the spooky and simply didn’t get enough of it.

In addition, readers may have some trouble with the writing style. While it will work for many, so much of it ends up being stream of consciousness - paragraph after paragraph of every thought that enters a character’s mind. And I’ll be honest – this is what made me almost DNF the book twice.

I did continue reading and (finally) got more of our very terrible house and I loved that part.

Try it. If the writing style suits you, you’ll know right away.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite right for me.

• ARC via Publisher

I was immediately intrigued by this book when I read "supernatural and real world horrors" I think that fiction can be used to tell a story of real world horrors and heavy, important topics in a way that's easier to digest. For this reason I was excited to read this one, unfortunately it wasn't for me. The horror in this book felt too real and difficult to read, it just didn't read like fiction to me. I felt like I was listening into someone I know completely falling apart and I found that haunting, Maybe that is exactly the intended purpose of this book and I am just not the ideal reader. I would like to give a lot of credit to the author who wrote trigger warnings at the beginning of the book, this is a very deep, dark story please consider the warnings carefully.

DNF. As much as I was looking forward to this book and had hoped I would like it, I'm having the hardest time connecting with it and am finding myself increasingly bored. Tonally, it reminds me of Kathe Koja's The Cipher - it's dark and moody, to the point of being overwrought, and tries too hard to be edgy (I've seen some other reviews dinging Tell Me I'm Worthless as being little more than some Twitter edgelord's attempt at writing fiction and as somebody who's seen and has had enough of Twitter edgelords, I can't really disagree). At 28%, it's also proving itself to be just as pointless and unnecessarily stretched out as The Cipher, and I refuse to put myself through this crap again. This might have been a good short story, or maybe a novella at most, but given how tedious the writing is at little more than a quarter of the way through, there's no way I can handle 200 more pages of this. I greatly appreciate Tor Nightfire providing me with a NetGalley ARC, but it's turned out this book just isn't for me.

This book will stay with me forever. It is not a comfortable read, but for all of its sickening and gut wrenching moments, it still found a way to make me shed tears of hope in the end. Rumfitt's take on a Jackson-esque haunted house asks you to put yourself in the shoes of someone who is nothing like you, someone that you might truly hate, and walk around for a minute. Told through a range of differing perspectives, the story allows you to feel the power that resides in privilege and prejudice, as well as the insecurity it is born from. The unabashed window into how complexly human and fragile we all are is a psychological and philosophical horror I know I won't get over any time soon. It begs the question, have you ever been haunted? It answers; in a world built by fascism, colonization and capitalism, aren't we all?

I received an advanced digital copy of this title from NetGalley.

Thank you to Tor Night Fire and Netgalley for this EARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is a remix on a haunted house story that will leave you disturbed. We follow two former best friends and lovers Alice and Ila. Alice is a trans woman while Ila is a queer woman who has become transphobic and is from an immigrant family living in England. They visited the haunted house Albion one night and were forever changed after.

I found this book incredibly disturbing, do not skip the trigger warnings written by the author in the front of the book. You will definitely want to read them! I found it difficult to read and cannot whole heartedly recommend it to a general audience.

I felt uneasy from the start, so if you are looking for a scary and unsettling read this one is for you. I was not very interested in all the British politics discussed, nor the prolific sex talk and actual graphic sex that was through out the book. The political metaphors were almost over the top and felt like it took away from the story more than contributing to it.

The ending also through me for a loop and was not my favorite. So this book was not absolutely for me but I think it had important messages on the continued violence inflicted against trans woman. This violence cannot be ignored and can only manifest into something uncontrollable like the haunted house, Albion.

I just don't think that this book was particularly for me - I felt it was ultimately doing too much and taking it a bit too far with the context, with no payoff for anything. I think if this was tweaked and edited a bit more, it could've been something I would have enjoyed. Ill try this author again for sure.

I’m going to start off this review with a preface that the writing style is phenomenal. Rumfitt has a talented way of making her story leap from the page, selecting just the right words to illustrate a point, and creating a sense of madness in the reader, which she does from the very first page.

Tell Me I’m Worthless is a transgressive horror novel that tackles a lot of themes. It does so in an obvious, in your face way, where metaphors are a thing of the past, and the author explicitly tells you what “lessons” you’re meant to walk away from the story with. I’m not a big fan of this approach. While the haunted house itself was terrifyingly original, and I liked the parallels in the character’s lives, I thought the entire book was too heavy-handed with the off-putting content in a way that ended up being over the top and at the same time, a little boring. The plot itself is also very slow, with bucketloads of anecdotes and analogies and descriptions tossed at the reader, dragging down an already slow plot to a snail’s pace.

The book opens with a trigger warning and a non-apologetic apology for including one. Ordinarily, for horror novels, I’d say trigger warnings aren’t critical (with some obvious exceptions), but with this book, you should definitely read the warning and heed it. The author doesn’t just graze these triggers, but faces them head-on, unflinchingly and gratuitously. I was already numb to the disturbing content by the third chapter, and it doesn’t let up for the entire book.


My main issue with this book, aside from the gratuitous and unrelenting triggers, is that there’s no “Before”. There’s no time in the characters’ lives where things were “good” and there isn’t really any light at the end of the tunnel for them to yearn for. There’s a reason why most horror movies start off with the happy family, people partying withe careless abandon, etc. Or, if the characters were never truly “happy” (as is the case in this book), then we need to be shown a time of normalcy. It’s because you can’t have a movie/book be all disturbing content all the time. We need to get to know the characters, to care about them, to want them to have a “happy ending”. There also needs to be some reprieve from the disturbing content or else the reader becomes immune. That was the case for me. When the truly “good stuff” started to happen toward the end of the book, I was already numb to the grossness of the book. Honestly, things never felt like they were escalating, which is something that I’ve come to expect with horrors and thrillers. The first chapter is just as disturbing as the climactic one, which, as a result, made the book feel a little anticlimactic.

Ultimately, the writing was phenomenal, but I didn’t particularly care about the characters, because I never knew them “before” they were driven half mad by the house.

Oof, this one was depressing: nearly all the trigger warnings imaginable are nestled within the pages. Our main characters are unreliable, damaged, reprehensible. Alice, a trans woman and Ila, used to be best friends (sometimes with benefits) but their friendship suddenly ended when each one says the other sexually assaulted her one acid-dream filled night in a haunted house with a dark history. Their third friend and Ila's roommate, Hannah, went missing in the house on the same night, never to be seen again. Now Alice is mostly a recluse and Ila is a prominent voice in a radical feminist group who thinks of trans women as less than. But the house is calling to them both...

This one is heavy on political views, and really, really heartbreaking. Thanks to Alison Rumfitt, Tor Nightfire and NetGalley for my review copy. Tell Me I'm Worthless will be published 1/17/23.

There was so much going on here. At the core, it is a book about the woman's experience living in a society shaped by fascism. The most successful parts of the book were in how both Ila and Alice became inundated with hatred and how it shaped their actions and behaviors- and taking a deep dive into all of the unsavory, intimate, raw details of their minds. You see how what happened to them negatively shapes who they are, their relationship to one another, and how their experience differs as Cis and Trans Women of different races, socio-economic classes, and religions. What was less successful was the sometimes redundant prose, including stream of consciousness (my least favorite in most writing), and the very direct and in-your-face fascism connection. I would have liked to see a more nuanced allegory.

That being said, I appreciate the work and will look out for Alison Rumfitt in the future. Heads up for anyone interested in reading this text, there is a surplus of rape, slurs, and all-around offensive material. I think all of this is necessary for this story to exist but is definitely hard to consume in some areas.

Thank you to the publisher, Tor Nightfire and Netgalley for the ARC.

Sadly, the beauty of this cover does not reflect the type of book this actually is. This book feels like trauma porn mixed in with every insufferable Twitter thread that you have ever read. Rumfitt is an author I would love to read - with a few more drafts.

Queer horror novel Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt adroitly positions its haunted house as a literalized source of fascism rooted in British nationalism and xenophobia.

It's been years since Alice and Ila visited The House, a malevolent supernatural force in the form of an abandoned, decaying estate, from which the third wheel of their group, Hannah, didn't return. Damaged by the encounter, trans woman Alice has lost herself in drug party culture, getting by making custom illicit hypno videos for closeted trans and queer folks. Her former partner Ila's shaken response to the same has been to dive into the British anti-trans movement, writing articles, making radio appearances, and feeling exploited by the movement for her brown skin and Jewish heritage. And then there is the house, which seethes with murderous intent, consciously working to draw them back in, and back to the ways it thoroughly traumatized them both with sexual violence. Ultimately, they must return to the house and confront it, their own shared trauma there, and the way the house's influence has affected them if they wish to move on in their lives.

Rumfitt walks an extraordinary line with this book, between the emotional experience of trans and queer folk living amidst greater hostility, and the fantastical connection of the house to rising European, and especially British, fascism in not-even-metaphorical, but explicit terms, in the text. It links this to explicitly violent scenes depicting sexual assault and rape that exemplify the horror rather than exploiting it; this book can be a harrowing read, even if it offers notes of hope.

This is not an apolitical work, and its point of view is strongly communicated directly; this will be a positive for many readers but those reading purely for escapism may wish to look elsewhere. While the house is anything but subtle in what it represents, the traditional gore horror elements are sparse but gruesome: the primary horror of the work is the characters navigating the hostile fascist elements of culture The House embrace and promotes, particularly violent homophobia, transphobia, racism, and misogyny.

Rumfitt's depiction of Ila is particularly well nuanced for a character expressing anti-trans sentiment as a reactionary response to sexual violence; the depiction is empathetic even while it condemns the response itself and the community exploiting Ila for political gain. Similarly effective is her use of voice for Alice, who lives in a state of limited affect, dissociating while suffering from the effects of the House's malevolence. The House continues to haunt her in her apartment through supernatural manifestations of the frontman on a poster of a popular band from the past (never explicitly stated, but through context clues heavily implied to be Morrissey of The Smiths). The House itself proves to be a strong character in its own right, drawing on a narrative of hate and aggression that is both supernatural and locally banal in its efforts to bring about its oppressive, violent ideals both in a larger sense to the nation, and upon the book's lead characters.

I cannot recommend this book without reservation, the explicit sexual violence may simply be too much for many readers, including those from the demographic whose experiences of institutional and personal trauma it depicts both literally and figuratively. That said, for those for whom this material isn't beyond the pale, this is an excellent, timely horror novel that strongly depicts the emotional reality of living under the threat of rising cultural violence as members of marginalized populations. It joins a growing slate of queer & trans horror and speculative fiction with three-dimensionally flawed characters that deftly examine these issues from a mix of the personal and metaphorical.

Opinions are my own and do not reflect those of the institution I work for.

A crazy, at times compelling read. I was drawn into the story's central relationship but struggled with the execution. Take, for example, this zinger of a description: "The room is as small and dull as it always was. And it is bright, brilliant, dazzling." Part Henry Miller, part SCUM manifesto, with some Bluebeard thrown in for good measure--and minimal actual horror--Tell Me I'm Worthless presents a whirlwind of ideas, lacking cohesion. I wondered if what I was reading was a first draft pounded out in some feverish frenzy. Perhaps that is what compelled me to keep reading. The author was on to something. Unfortunately, kernels of occasional insights, even brilliance, are buried under the detritus of Tumblr rants I found difficult, if not impossible, to sift through. More scrupulous editing may have polished this mess into a diamond. Perhaps the Netgalley version I read was an early draft. 2.5 stars

Thank you for the advanced readers copy for an honest review

The beginning was hard for me to get into.
Having said that some of the issues being spoken about in this book, should really be spoken about more.

Not sure how I feel about this book, it wasn’t bad, but it was different in a good way

Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt is a Horror novel that puts a modern day twist on the classic haunted house story.

Three years ago, three women (Alice, Ila and Hannah) entered an abandoned house with a sinister, haunting past. Hannah never makes it out and Alice and Ila’s relationship is transformed completely as each believes the other has committed heinous crimes against the other. But they both can’t be right, can they? From lovers and best friends to two people who never speak and are spiraling out of control, it feels like their only option is to return to The House and find out what really happened all those years ago.

Before I get into my thoughts, I want to acknowledge that this book could be triggering in a lot of ways, including but not limited to: sexual assault, body horror, antisemitism, racism and transphobia. So consider that before diving in.

First, I want to say that I commend the author for taking such a big swing with her debut novel and appreciate the honest, raw commentary on queer and trans identity. I believe this book could be a really powerful tool for serious topics like what it means to be a woman today and trans identity in today’s culture.

As far as horror is concerned, however, especially horror related to The House, which was what drew me to this book in the first place, I was pretty underwhelmed. That part of the story doesn’t really come into play until about halfway through the book, and even then seems to be inserted in in sporadic chunks, rather than seamlessly throughout. For this reason, I felt like I kept being pulled out of the story and it was harder for me to get excited about picking up the book to continue reading.

Overall, I chose 3 stars for Tell Me I’m Worthless because I think it was a great piece of trans fiction, but the focus on more radical, political horror is less my style and not what I thought the story would be about based on the description given.

That being said, it’s a powerful book, overflowing with passion and, yes, terror. Just not the kind I personally look for in a horror novel.

What’s scarier than a haunted house? A fascist a haunted house. This is a very different take on the haunted house story, it’s not an easy read, it’s powerful and uncomfortable and raw. The way the story blends the literal and metaphorical and how the prose bleeds into stream of consciousness is very effective. A very strong debut novel, I look forward to reading more from this author in the future.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

this was a whirlwind to actually sit down to read. this consumed me and left me speechless at the same time. please check the content warnings for this because it’s a BRUTAL piece of literature that conveys a very realistic message pertaining to the world we live in right now (more specifically in the UK)
i can’t recommend this to anyone for those reasons but wow i’m truly gutted and haunted after reading this

2.5 stars rounded up to 3

I really wanted to absolutely adore this book. There was a lot of promising ideas in this and I loved that the house had it's own POV. The problems for me were the writing and the characters. Now, I don't need to love my characters but I felt that these ones were built upon their ideals but didn't have any actual hobbies or personalities. I didn't care what happened to them. When it comes to the writing, there were parts I had to skim because I found it extremely repetitive and some ideas just went on and on after a point was already made. I do think that this story could have been a novella strictly from the house's POV and I would have found it much more enjoyable.

*Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an e-ARC to me in exchange for my honest review.*

Chilling, enthralling, engrossing! Really enjoyed the book and spending time in the world of the story.