This book was brutal. I can not understand the type of hate that was described here. I expected violence, hate, even racism in most horror novels, but what was written here was way more than I could take. The 2 main characters, one a Trans woman and one a Lesbian, had such hatred for each other and themselves I was floored. And the hate that others spewed at the Trans people was sickening to me.
I'm not sure if this book is brave for addressing what Trans people may go through or dangerous for inciting such hate that even went into anti-semetism and Facists.
I won't tell you to not read this, but I hope and pray you are an intelligent human who realizes that this is a representation of one group and does not encompass all of us in the LGBTQA community.
Thanks to @Netgalley for the opportunity to read this in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion, though I wished I had skipped this experience.

Thank you Tor for providing me with this ARC!

Check the god damn trigger warnings. The author puts them at the beginning but please do read them. This story was NOT your typical haunted house story. It focuses on what it means to be trans, a terf, and SA’d,

This story haunted me. And still does. An excellent debut novel.

Summary:
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.

My Thoughts: This is one of those books that I have a hard time articulating my thoughts. This book is dark and disturbing. It was at times hard to read. This is a book that I will think about in the future and will most likely reread. It’s hands down one of my favorite reads of 2022.

The narrator did a fantastic job.

This is a book that I think I would have preferred to read physically rather than as an audiobook. However, I think the audio performance was very well done - I just found the story itself incredibly distant and hard to follow.

That said, I think the horror elements and haunted house tropes in this book are so well done. It's uncomfortable and strange and horrific and sickening in a way that makes it difficult to recommend this story. The horror is entrenched in politics, and the politics in horror. While at times it can feel like messages are being stated plainly when I would have preferred to work out the messages we carry through the characters and their actions, I found the political statements surrounding TERF rhetoric and the identities and experiences of trans women incredibly poignant.

This is a complicated story, and it's difficult to review it. I'm grateful to have read it and would like to revisit it as a physical book one day.

When I saw negative reviews saying this book was too heavy on the social commentary, I knew it would be exactly the kind of horror I like. And I wasn't wrong.

Tell Me I'm Worthless is a haunted house story about anti-trans rhetoric and fascism. It's dark and unflinching, with a slew of content warnings and a lot of references to literature and online discourse from the past few years. It is particularly concerned with the state of anti-trans and fascist idealogy in the UK, but has wider application.

On one level, it's about a trans woman and and a cis lesbian who were friends before visiting a haunted house where each claims the other sexually assaulted them. The house becomes a physical manifestation of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, homophobia, fascism, and colonial ideology. The book is a deeply uncomfortable melange of the overlapping and complex relationships between these things and how they are tied to fear, trauma, and fetishization.

It taps into the concept of the "oppression olympics"- how do you compute who is more oppressed? The white trans woman forced into sex work to survive? Or the brown Jewish lesbian used as the face of a mostly white TERF movement? And speaking of TERFs, what does it mean to be a woman? Is being trans "mutilation" or is surgically changing ones body a common element of womanhood? And in all the uproar about trans women in bathrooms, who is truly in danger? Also there is the literalization of the threat to blonde white women being used as a symbol, the fetishization of Blackness, and the violence of internalized transphobia.

This should give you an idea of what the book is about, although it's also very much a gruesome horror novel as well. And I'm sure I'm missing some of what it's doing, but the conversations it's having are important ones. The reviews saying this is a lot of social commentary aren't wrong, I just happen to like horror being used as a vehicle for that. The audio narration is also great and occasional audio effects are used chillingly. I received an audio review copy of this book via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Content warnings include graphic r*ape, mutilation, slurs, deadnaming, homophobia, transphobia, racism, graphic fetishization of trans people and of violating trans people, depictions of blood, violence, death, body horror, murder, medical experimentation, antisemitism etc.

Thank you Netgalley for the ALC. The narrator was superb but, with that said nope. This book was absolutely not for me. There was way too much rhetoric and way too much leeway for the TERFs to like this book. I’d steer clear. Genuinely I would have given the writing zero stars, though the narrator’s performance was really well done.

I am neither Trans nor British. Being a white cisgender female American, my interpretation of this book will be entirely clouded by that lens. Maybe I won't "get it" or maybe it just won't be my preferred method of storytelling. Take my opinion with all the grains of salt you need.

As a narrative, the tension between haunted people and haunted places was perfectly taut. Does a haunted house need to be populated by ghosts? Could the structure actually be haunted by ideas? Do ghosts need a physical place to congregate? Can't they just follow whoever attracts them with their own pain?

Trauma does impact memory, so the dual POV was a great choice. The story was enrichened with the concept that we are all unreliable narrators by the mere fact that all memory is malleable.

Heads up: this book is GRAPHIC. Beyond just gritty or intense, the violence is unsettling. I wanted to bail so many times, but maybe that was the point?

I did finish though, because despite being incredibly flawed and upsetting individuals, I did need to know where their experiences eventually lead them. Will I reread this book? Never. Will I recommend it to others? Possibly a select group of people will adore this book, need this story, and revel in finally being represented. I think I am better informed for living within a wildly different perspective, and will want to share that experience with as many people as I think will need that as well.

“What’s wrong?” my husband asked with concern as he saw me sitting on the couch, earphones in, and tears running down my cheeks.

“The audiobook I’m listening to really got to me,” I explained, lightly tapping my fingers over my heart.

“Wow,” was all he could say. “I’ve never seen you cry from reading a book.”

And he’s correct. The last time a book made me cry was over a decade ago.

Tell Me I’m Worthless is so powerfully written that it had this rare effect on me. The first person narrative of one of the main characters, Alice, is incredibly honest and vulnerable. She shares her thoughts so intimately that I felt like she was a real person that I was getting to know and care about.

I listened to this audiobook every chance I got. When I woke up in the morning I wanted to start listening right away and learn what happened next. Every moment of this compelling novel engaged my mind and heart. The writing is extremely strong and graphic, but not unnecessarily so. The descriptions need to be as vulgar and shocking as they are to fully give the reader the feeling of how profoundly vile and dangerous fascism is, and how haunted and traumatized the main characters Alice, Hannah, and Ila are.

I appreciate the content warning that Alison Rumfitt put at the beginning. I had to be mentally prepared to read about graphic violence and rape, as well as racism, self-injury, abuse, anti-semitism, and other harrowing things. The trigger warning let me know what I was getting into before starting the novel and I was ready to hear this story.

The narration by Nicky Endress was top tier. Their voice is thrilling to hear and a perfect match for the topic.

I would definitely like to read other books by this author and hear other books narrated by Nicky Endress.

Thank you very much Alison Rumfitt, Netgalley, and MacMillan for giving me a free audiobook in exchange for my opinion.

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC.

Prepare to be disturbed and haunted. I finished this book days ago and have not stopped thinking about it randomly throughout my day. Phenomenal, one of my favorite books of 2022! This is not your typical haunted house novel. The house is a whole character and it's name is Albion. The presence of that dark, red place follows our two Alice and Illa for years after they make the mistake of breaking into the abandoned house one fateful night. Their friend, Hannah, tagged along but never made it out.

Alice and Illa both deal with intense memories they faced within the walls of Albion. This is extreme body horror at it's finest. Not to mention the irrevocable changes made to their perceptions of the world. What I loved about this book was the deep exploration into fascism, trauma, bias, and how they can destroy our very humanity. Super dark and refelctive, this book still didn't take itself too seriously and played into the ridiculousness of certain scenarios. I don't want to give anything away but if you read one horror novel, let it be this one. A truly stunning hallmark of trans fiction that will impact me for the forseeable future. I listened to this on audiobook and I highly reccomend it that way. I'm sure it would still be just as haunting and amazing as a physical read, but the narrator absolutely killed it. IN THE BEST WAY. 5/5 stars, will reccomend until the day I die.

In this haunting book, two women once close and now at odds are inexplicably drawn back to the scene of horrific trauma that has changed their lives forever. Rumfitt's ambitious debut novel deals with queer trauma and the oppressive machinations of fascism (and the impossibility of untangling those machinations from our lives). I really enjoyed how dark this book was- it allowed for an honest examination of hard, real-world truths through the lens of a haunted house story. The prose flowed poetically (which makes sense, since Rumfitt is also a poet!) and I loved the multi-perspectival approach to understanding the story through different characters. The story itself, however, felt sacrificed to the narrow focus on the themes. I wanted to connect more with the characters in order to feel the horror of this book but it just didn't happen for me. That being said, this book makes the author one to watch out for!

Thanks to NetGalley & MacMillan Audio for providing an audio ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is one of those books that is not For Everyone. And I'm not sure if I would categorize it as For Me or not. I enjoy a little horror writing, and I was interested to see what spin would be placed on a trans horror novel. Overall, it was good, interesting, and I wanted to find out what happened. The writing tends to be a bit clunky (another reviewer called out the author for referencing "the capitalism shining in her eyes," in one chapter about Hannah, and, yeah, that's the kind of lines you get in this book), and the length of the TWs at the start of the book should tell you you're not in Kansas anymore.

Clearly, Alison Rumfitt is a fan of Shirley Jackson, and she borrows heavily from other works. The Big Bad in this book is a dilapidated house known to itself as Albion. The good parts: the house draws people to it in order to trap them inside. Its nearness to a block of flats causes some residents to become suddenly suicidal. It kills of workers who are hired to convert it into condos.
The bad parts: the house is a Nazi, a fascist. The house is built on a former graveyard, but no further discussion of that is provided; it's unclear if it was a cemetery of dead Nazi sympathizers or what - maybe I missed that part. The references to fascism are frequent, and have all the subtlety of a cudgel on the skull.

Everyone in this book is desperately unhappy, which I guess is pretty common for a horror novel. I've seen comparisons to Trainspotting, which is fair. There's a fair amount of drug abuse and casual, meaningless sex being carried out by miserable folks who self-harm, abuse their partners, etc. There is also Morrissey, who goes unnamed, but exudes menace through a poster hung on the protagonist's wall, put there to cover an eerily human-looking damp stain.

I'm still processing this book. There were parts of it I really liked. The writing can be a bit too simple for my taste, but this doesn't entirely read like a debut horror novel. I feel like Rumfitt spent too much time making sure her feelings on fascism were clear/drawing a comparison between Albion, the house, and England, the country and not enough on tweaking the story and making it genuinely terrifying. It provided more dread and unease than scares. Plenty of gore, too.

As a treatise on how England is sh*tty and modern citizens feel dislocated from purpose, the novel works very well. Rumfitt has a sometimes conspiratorial way of writing that is engaging. I could have done without the twist at the end with Ila (it feels faintly ridiculous to me) but I think to Rumfitt it was necessary to show that even if people get their sh*t together and carve out some happiness, Albion/England will still be sucky and will exude its evil influence over the populace.

Nicky Endres did an excellent job with the voice acting. There were very long parts where it didn't seem like she even took a breath! She has a great range of tone/timber and did a decent job of differentiating between characters (although her voice for Hannah was really just normal voice with a lone of whine. Thankfully Hannah doesn't have lots of lines).

I gave an overall review of Tell Me I'm Worthless under the general e-arc's page. However, I particularly enjoyed the narrator's voicing of the haunted house itself, as well as the sound effects used to intensify the scenes within the house itself. Both were absolutely chilling.

This book sounded so interesting to me and I was so thankful for the ALC. However, upon listening, it was too graphic and vulgar for my liking. I listened to the authors content warnings and thought it was something that I could handle. But I was not prepared. I could see how the story could grow into something beautiful and may try to pick up the book another time. I think it may be easier to read than to listen to. The narrator did a wonderful job of portraying the main character and all the emotions involved in this book. Thank you for the opportunity to listen to this!

Not just a novel but a work of art. A thick textured oil painting of carved up bodies of all genders scattered across the dripping floor plan of a haunted house. Rotting wood, fresh bodies. Visceral, raw. This is a story with smell, taste, and a gag reflex.
Beautiful souls irrevocably damaged by society, cursed further by the draw to an abandoned building that chews people up and never truly lets them escape.
What really does more harm here? Society unwilling to let trans people be who they are or a haunted house hungry for blood?
I received an audiobook version from MacMillan, narrated by Nicky Endres and it was incredibly well done. Top of the line production

Thank you NetGalley, Macmillan Audio, and Alison Rumfitt for the advanced copy of Tell Me I'm Worthless.

I unfortunately decided to DNF this one at about 25%. It's a classic case of "it's not you, it's me." The writing style is a bit too literary for my taste and I just couldn't really grasp anything that was happening.

As is always the case for me, I will not review this on any platform aside from NetGalley, as I don't feel it's fair to do without finishing.

I love a good book title and "Tell Me I'm Worthless" immediately got my attention because of that. However, it was hearing good reviews from BookTubers that I follow that made me decide to check it out. Overall, I highly enjoyed this book and recommend it. I found it hard to put down and got through it in three days. However, due to the book's rawness (which I believe is important to the message of the book), I don't believe it is for everyone.

The Rumfitt's writing style does a wonderful job of bringing the story and characters to life, and I appreciated the clever way in which they use "the house," which is one of the characters in the book, and its connections to other characters as a metaphor for societal issues happening in the UK today. I found the book difficult to put down because not only did I enjoy their writing style, but I also wanted to find out what had happened between the characters and within the house.

The book does not shy away from the horrors of society, including racism, xenophobia, transphobia, sexual assault, and other various types of physical and psychological violence. This is the core of the book and, in not shying away from the violence of these issues, it also results in Rumfitt creating scenes that can be graphic and very violent. Therefore, this book may not be for everyone because of the graphic nature, especially in terms of sexual assault.

Audiobook specific: I listened to the audiobook version of this and enjoyed the narration of the text, even when it felt a bit dramatic at points (which, in their defense, I think was the point). Since the narrator's voice and tone were the same for almost all the characters, I would have thought it would have been confusing for the listener, but they did a good job making clear which character they were speaking for. There was one moment in the audiobook where dramatic music was used in the background, which I found distracting since there was no precedent for it (nor was it used again). This is nitpicking, but I think that could have been left out.

Highly recommend this book for readers of horror and thrillers, as well as those who enjoy creative take on the human rights and justice issues of contemporary Britain.

I have such mixed feelings about this book so I don't feel comfortable giving it a star rating yet. I am also writing this review as a cis woman, where this book is very much about transness and the trans experience.

This is going to be such a stream of consciousness review and I'm apologizing for that up front. My instinct is to absolutely love this book. Heavily influenced by horror legend Shirley Jackson (amongst others,) Tell Me I'm Worthless is a stunning and atmospheric gothic novel. Rumfitt updates the haunted house story into a modern era and pays homage to the political beginnings of the horror genre.

"Ghosts are born from trauma and violence" is one of my favorite lines from this book. Every character is haunted by traumas both acute and ongoing from living in a hostile society that would rather seem them dead. In order to confront these traumas and ghosts, Alice and Ila must return to The House where they were permanently scarred years ago. Tell Me I'm Worthless is truly horrifying in both the ghostly/body horror/possession sort of way and the fascist/transphobic/political way. I have been properly unsettled by this book and will probably need time to process it.

Here's where I fall off a bit and have a hard time: Rumfitt gives a lot of space for TERF and transphobic rhetoric. I mean, a lot. So much so that I wouldn't feel comfortable recommending this to trans friends who I think would otherwise love this style of horror. Not all of it is in a contextual way, like this is the society we're in and the hateful people we're forced to interact with. I don't know if this next bit is a spoiler but I'll block it out anyway - [Making Ila, everyone's least favorite TERF, come out as a closeted trans man at the end is... definitely a choice. (hide spoiler)]

After all of that said, I think this is a wonderfully written book with such a strong concept and execution. I don't think it's a book that I can give a star-review because my feelings are so all over the place. CWs for transphobia, antisemitism, homophobia, fascism, sexual assault (graphic) and... just about everything else that you could possibly think of.

What an interesting read! I highly recommend it if you're looking for something a bit outside the box and want to stretch what you might normally read. It's hard to place this story in any one bucket, part horror, part narrative.

Either 4 or 4.5. What approved for the audiobook from Netgalley so I bumped this up on my tbr. This was powerful, horrific, eye-opening... just wow. A Gothic haunted house story with a massive fascist 'undertone'. Basically your classic haunted house story with humanity horror throw in which has a very terrifying outcome.

Thank you Netgalley for the advance audiobook copy of Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt in exchange for an honest review. This story reminded me of another haunted house/person story I read this year, but a lot darker. It is full of trauma, pain and the inner workings of someone who was never really accepted by their parents and has a hard time accepting themselves. It was a hard story to listen to.