This book is meant to speculatively horror and thrill. Dr. Tamsin is not the most likable of main characters and has you constantly questioning the reliability of her narration throughout the book. When she dicovers the city San Siroco is sinking and a mysterious doppelganger appears Dr. Tamsin world devolves into chaos . Is the doppleganger or Dr. Tamsin's experiments the cause of the sinking city, or are their other supernatural forces at play?

Slow to start but strong to finish, Last to Leave the Room is an unsettling, mesmerizing speculative sci-fi psychological thriller.

Caitlin Starling is also the author of The Death of Jane Lawrence. If you enjoyed that book because of the historical fiction aspect, this is not that, but if you loved the psychological horror aspects, this is similar. Much like in Jane Lawrence, we have a woman struggling with a force she doesn’t really understand, and we, the readers are also unsure, at least at the outset, what is going on. In truth, the story is less about the "why" but the "what." We watch the effect Tamsin’s doppelganger has on her, and we’re not sure why it’s happening. In a sense, we’re trapped in the house with Tamsin, unsure what’s going to happen next or how to approach it.

The book does start off very slowly, though, primarily because Tamsin isn’t likable or relatable. She’s a workaholic, distrustful, and obsessive, and who seems to have no interests other than fancy cocktails and her work - which we’re never really told about in detail. There’s talk about “the lab” and the city sinking, but we’re not really sure what the company has hired Tamsin to do. As such, the sci-fi elements are quite thin on the ground, a vehicle in which to propel the main storyline.

Yet, I didn’t really care. Once the doppel, or Prime, as Tamsin called her, showed up, the outside world in the sense of the novel stopped being important. Similarly, Tamsin, who, as I said, is this hard-ass, lofty woman, becomes, if not sympathetic, but almost an experiment in herself. We are the ones watching what is going on in the house, watching what Tamsin is going to do next as she tries to figure out what is going on. The mystery itself, the realism behind how Tamsin acts and reacts to the oddness of the situation, is what is compelling about the novel. It's less about caring about Tamsin than trying to figure out wtf is happening. It has a sort of House of Leaves feel to it at the start, and then as we get deeper in, we think we know what’s happened, and then, bam, there is some body horror stuff that takes the story in an entirely new direction.

I also really enjoyed the character Lachlan and how our perception of her changes as the story moves along.

This is one of those books that takes a bit to get going but once it does, it doesn’t stop. There are some fascinating and interesting concepts in this novel, so I’m glad I powered the first little bit.

If you love psychological thrillers then you should check this out.

I was excited to receive this ARC read since I had loved The Death of Jane Lawrence by her and liked The Luminous Dead by her too, sadly to say Last to Leave the Room was a let down for me by this author. This book was more sci fi then horror because reading it was a lot more sci fi with a little thriller aspect thrown in. The book had a lot of technical wording right from the beginning which was so hard to understand that it bogs the story down with it. Last to Leave the Room was a disappoint for me and I still am confused by this whole book. I will still read more of Caitlin Starling's books and just say that this one was not for me. Thank you to NetGalley and publisher for this ARC read in exchange of my honest review.

I wrote/published two more lengthy reviews at the attached links, but I really enjoyed reading this book! It's a bit of a slow build but once it got going I was hooked. I loved the characters, loved the relationships, and loved the horror. The worldbuilding/setting felt a little bit underdeveloped to me, but it didn't detract from my enjoyment of the novel very much. Overall, I would recommend this book (and Starling's other novels!) to any modern horror lover.

I always enjoy Caitlin Starling's writing. The Death of Jane Lawrence was a 5 star hit for me and in Luminous Dead she twisted clostrophobia into an affliction that I didn't know I had. She can take a common theme and end up with the most original unique book. Last to Leave the Room is a perfect example of this. I cannot recommend this book enough. Outstanding work.

Dr Tamsin Rivers works hard. She's a bit ruthless, and very determined and her current project revolves around determining why the parts of the city appear to be sinking.
And whether or not this sinking it connected to the mysterious door that has appeared in her own basement and now has become her own personal obsession- especially as someone has walked through that impossible door.
A someone who looks exactly like Tamsin herself.
This was a great read. Weird, a little horrifying, a borderline supernatural, it unfolded slowly as Tamsin figured out what was going on herself and lost herself and found herself again.

Thank you to NetGalley for an eArc in exchange for an honest review.

This book starts out slow and creeping as it sets up the ambitious main character and the complicated world of her experiments, a slowly sinking city, and the appearance of a mysterious door. Once the door actually opens, everything begins increasing in terms of tension, speed, and horror, culminating in a few twists that sent a shiver down my spine. Excellently plotted, and with a narrative voice that changes to reflect the fracturing mental state of the main character, this book is an eerie, haunting sci-fi horror.

Dr. Tamsin's basement is sinking. Tasmin River is a brilliant scientist tasked to figure out why the whole city seems to be stretching down in places where there is nowhere to go. She's gotten to her position by being cold and ruthless, two characteristics the company needs to get ahead of this problem. When she discovers a door in her basement, and then a doppelganger walks out of it, Tasmin is more intrigued than scared. But as she gets to know this version of her, she starts to lose herself in the process.

This book floats between genres. It's between sci-fi, horror, and thriller, with a touch of paranormal. It's very unique and niche, but I don't know if this is my specific subgenre. The blending between science fiction and the paranormal didn't mesh well, personally. So, while it was clever and specific, I wish we had stuck more with one or the other.

Once you get past the first quarter, this book is very atmospheric. In the beginning, there are lots of explanations and technical terms introduced to set the stage, but after those are all laid out the book becomes a moody read. It was strange, grotesque, and bizarre in the best of ways. It inspired feelings of panic and deja vu and made me second-guess what I was reading. Unfortunately, this whole experience was drawn out too long. While I love a weird read, this was better suited for a shorter novel. It all started to drag, and I ended up skimming through some chapters to get to the meat of the story.

The romance subplot needed to go. It isn't introduced until much later, and really threw me for a loop. There was no build-up to it, just all of a sudden, it was there. I didn't see the reason why it was included, since it added nothing to the plot. In fact, it disregarded the personalities of the characters in a certain way. My other problem was it came across as a fetish. Maybe that's how the author wanted to present it, but I got the sense I was supposed to root for these characters to get together. The pairing was an odd combination for so many reasons and took away from the story.

This isn't a story you are supposed to fully grasp. It's weird and goes beyond our scientific reasoning, so don't go in with the expectation to understand the mechanics behind everything.
It was strange, weird, grotesque, confusing, and utterly horrific at times. As someone who has a strong stomach for gross things, this one made me a little squeamish at times. This is a great read for spooky season, but it is not going to sit right with everyone. If you like T Kingfisher's What Moves the Dead, this will appeal to you.

Main TW: body horror, violence. (Please check all TW before going into this one)

Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the advance copy. All thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

I almost DNF'd this at 20% and I am so glad I didn't. My problem was that the book was marketed as horror and it wasn't at all, IMHO. It is science fiction or more specifically, speculative fiction. Tamsin Rivers comes face to face with her doppelganger and the book deals with what becomes of that. Once I realized what I was reading it didn't take long for me to get hooked. The book is very slow-paced and there is a lot of science in it but it's told simply enough for the layperson. It is a weird book but very entertaining. The relationship that comes to fruition is interesting as well. A hard book to write about but well worth the read. My favourite of the month, so far.

A little like The Death of Jane Lawrence in that it has a long, long buildup and then a hell of a ride at the end. I'm not sure how I feel recommending a book where I have to explain that "okay at the 75% point it really gets going!" On the other hand, the last quarter wouldn't work without the first three... and that last quarter is REALLY good. I always find something interesting in Starling's books and like and recommend them, but I don't think she's really nailed the pacing since The Luminous Dead.

DNF at 25 percent. I tried really hard to get into this but the writing style just wasn’t connecting for me. I’ve seen a few reviews saying it is slow in the beginning and I tried pushing through but I just wasn’t having a good time.

Last to Leave the Room is a taut, introspective thriller about a woman who's double appears out of a mysterious, unopenable, self-healing door that appeared when her basement subsided -- a phenomenon going on throughout her town, and which she's tasked with studying and may have been involved with causing due to her underground lab in reclaimed subway space for a mysterious agency.

The double, who she dubs "Prime" is at first quite docile and compliant as they navigate their new existence. She has no demands, and has an interesting mix of knowledge and ignorance of the concepts that the original ("Nought") has learned over time -- cooking (or lack thereof with meal replacement shakes and kits), scientific experiment, navigating the outside world, etc.

Over time, they begin to have many identity crises as pressure from work, the city sinking, coexisting, and numerous other things take a toll -- especially with the clinical and overbearing boss who comes by for visits and insists on updates. Nought eventually can't even leave the house, leading to the inevitable and unthinkable.

This is a very creative and thought-provoking novel, with some great meta-awareness of other uses of this trope and how it usually works out for the original. I definitely would have loved to know more about the observation effects in why appearances change in certain ways and the underground world, but this was great.

This had an intriguing concept, but suffered from pacing in the the first half that was too slow, which ultimately resulted in failure to hold my interest.

This is an enormously disturbing and excellent horror story about the limitations and ethics of technology, what self-hood is and how it can be manipulated, and the role of private institutions in the public sector, a very real and growing concern. Starling deftly weaves all of these together in the story of Tamsin, a scientist tasked with uncovering potential problems her company has created with its research and projects. She's on top of it all until her own house begins to exhibit changes seen elsewhere in the city--but at a much faster rate. Then her basement grows a door, and her doppelgänger comes through it.

There's a fair amount of gore and death as well as emotional and psychological abuse. I felt quite bad for the doppelgänger cat.

This is not my first Caitlin Starling book so I went into this knowing that this would be weird and strange, and probably really confusing. Her writing style can be hard for me to understand sometimes (she’s just too smart for me!) but I love how dark her stories are. It’s never full blown horror but also mixes something different like a Victorian gothic setting, or in this case, more of a black mirror sci-fi vibe with the concept of a sinking basement and a double coming through a door that wasn’t there before.

This book was a difficult start for me. I had trouble staying focused because I had no clue what anyone was talking about. I had trouble the wanting to pick this back up because I had zero clue what was going on. The dialogue in this book was super sciencey and basically was all jargon. I had no clue what anyone was saying, ever. It gets much better after she finds the door though, which luckily is pretty soon. Even so, I had trouble getting through this until I got to part 3 in this book.

Part of what made me want to read this was when I read that this was comparable this to Dark Matter and The Hollow Places, two of my favorite books, but I couldn’t see any comparison between these at all until the last 5% of this book. I wish there was more of an explanation too, because while they did touch on it, I didn’t exactly understand why the double would want to stay in this world over her own to begin with? That was my main point of confusion.

I love the ideas Caitlin Starling comes up with, but whenever I finish one of her books, I’m always left with questions and not enough closure. Her interesting storylines always reel me in but I always feel like I need more of an explanation after finishing her books. Nonetheless, I just know if her next book has an interesting synopsis, I’ll still want to read that one too.

Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for sending me an advanced copy in return for my honest review.

Well, that was disturbing. 😳

Last to Leave the Room creeps in with an insidious hallucinatory hook that gradually pulls you into its depths.

It's freaky and bizarre, and I loved it.

And that's all I'm saying. 🤐

*Thanks to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for the eARC!!*

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for a fair review:

I love Caitlin Starling's horror novels, because I love her pacing. She starts as close to the action as possible, and only includes details relevant to the plot. Both The Luminous Dead and The Death of Jane Lawrence are strong yet lean novels. I'm never bored, and I have trouble putting them down.

So I was a little disappointed when I got five chapters into Last to Leave the Room and found myself bored. Nothing's perfect, though, so I kept going to chapter 15, where I felt like things were finally happening. They weren't. I'll be honest, if I hadn't gotten this book off NetGalley, I may not have finished it.

The thing that makes Starling's books work, for me, is the relentless focus on necessary detail combined with cutting the wheat from the chaff. I never feel like things haven't progressed in a chapter, like things aren't developing. Yet that's a huge problem in Last to Leave the Room. Once the delicious joy of reading Tamsin's neuroses wears off, there's a lot of detail I just don't care about, and the detail I do care about is spread thin with incremental development. I never cared about the node project Tamsin was working on, perhaps because there's precious little detail about it in the actual novel. It's a thing that Tamsin has to deal with to justify her deteriorating mental state, but it's very vague within the novel. Maybe I missed something, but considering how lush with detail The Death of Jane Lawrence is with medical gore and The Luminous Dead is with cave diving, I doubt it. This book ultimately feels like it was originally a novella that publishers wanted stretched out to novel length. In the end, it feels boring and empty, which is the exact opposite of what I go to for a Caitlin Starling novel.

That said, I think it is of great interest to anyone who really, really enjoys unreliable narrator POV, especially when that POV is a very 'problematic' woman. That just wasn't enough for me, personally, to make the book shine.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher St. Martin's Press for an advance copy about a sinking city, a driven scientist, a mysterious door, all in a genre defying story.

Some books sneak up readers, usually when a reader goes into a story with preconceived notions. That, 'I have read so many many books I know where things are going and what is happening before the writer does', attitude that one gets after reading books that go A=B and followed by C. I know I am very guilty of that. But I love when I am wrong, at least when it comes to books, and this novel is one of those were I kept thinking I knew what was going on, until I flipped the page. And I really enjoyed every minute of it. Last to Leave the Room by Caitlin Starling is a techo-thriller, science fiction novel that defies expectations and takes reader on a journey not only through science, and weirdness, but into the human condition and what we make of ourselves to be thought of as perfect.

San Siroco is a company town in the 21st century way, bought and paid for by corporation to exploit and use in anyway they see fit. Myrica Dynamic is the corporate owners, controlling and adapting the town for their underground labs for tests that they are trying to keep secret, while building a transit system that will revitalize the area. Things are progressing well, until Dr Tasmin Rivers discovers that the city is somehow sinking into the earth. Not the suburbs but the city itself. Tests show the ground is strong, but somehow the city has sunk 27 millimeters in only two months, but where it is going no one, including Dr. Rivers knows. However there is a larger secret Tasmin is keeping, one that could put her job at risk, and one that she is using all her political skill and selfish sneakiness in keeping. The basement under Tasmin's house is sinking at a much more rapid rate than anywhere else, almost double what the city is experiencing. And in a sealed basement a door has appeared on the far wall, and when opened a person who looks very much like Tasmin Rivers is on the other side.

A book with so many ideas it could easily have gone off the rails, into the trees and been lost forever. Caitlin Starling, however has a real skill in balancing both the ideas, the story, the weirdness that floats just outside the plot and more importantly the characters. Creating a science thriller and making it make sense, and easy to follow, and being able to trust the reader to follow along, and not lose the pace, very few writers could do that. The plot is good, but the characters really make it. Rivers is fascinating and changes a few times, but never becomes someone you don't want to know more about. The story telling is very good, and never loses the reader, and more importantly never gives anything away.

A story that goes in many place and defies the readers expectations. Recommended for readers who enjoy science fiction thrillers with a bit of the odd. This is the first book I have read by Caitlin Starling but I can't wait to read more.

This premise was interesting. It gave me a Stephen King/Dean Koontz feeling but without the spine tingling anxiety they create. This rang more of a mystery to me rather than horror but maybe the “horror” was the situation of the city sinking and an unexpected double.

It was well written enough to keep me reading and wanting to know what happens. I have to admit, I didn’t predict the ending completely. In fact, I had to read the last few chapters again to make sure I understood it properly.

I do recommend this book but I will tell you, if you are desensitized to fear/horror, I feel you won’t get the full effect of the story the author was going for. That’s what happened to me but I enjoyed the story, nevertheless.

Last to Leave the Room is an absolutely crazy story about a woman who finds her basement is elongating and a door appears. An exact physical copy of her comes from the door and the roller coaster ride takes off. Yes, the beginning is a bit slow and the scientific talk is a lot, but the story is so good that it really does not matter. I had no idea about any of the science stuff and found the story fantastic. There is a fair amount of body horror so brace yourself. The setting makes the story feel super claustrophobic, the tension and pressure are amazing. This is one of those books where either you love it or you don't get it, I myself loved it. I have the say that when it flipped to Nought about 3/4 through I was blown away. I was like, what is happening? It blew me away. Great story.