Tell Me I'm Worthless

Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless is a dark, unflinching haunted house story that confronts both supernatural and real-world horrors through the lens of the modern-day trans experience.“Alison is like the twisted daughter of Clive Barker and Shirley Jackson. Tell Me I’m Worthless is an intense read full of shocks and buckets of gore. It’s brilliant.” ―Joe Hill, New York Times bestselling authorA Best Horror Book of the Year (Esquire, Book Riot, ) • A Most Anticipated Book of the Year (CrimeReads, Vulture, Goodreads, Paste)“A triumph of transgressive queer horror.” ―Publishers Weekly, STARRED reviewThree 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.Cutting, disruptive, and darkly funny, Tell Me I’m Worthless is a vital work of trans fiction that examines the devastating effects of trauma and how fascism makes us destroy ourselves and each other.“Easily one of the strongest horror debuts in recent memory.” ―Booklist, STARRED reviewAlso by Alison Rumfitt:Brainwyrms

Joe Hill, New York Times bestselling author

“Alison is like the twisted daughter of Clive Barker and Shirley Jackson. Tell Me I’m Worthless is an intense read full of shocks and buckets of gore. It’s brilliant.”

Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

“A triumph of transgressive queer horror.”

Booklist, STARRED review

“Easily one of the strongest horror debuts in recent memory.”

Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World and The Pallbearers Club

“A gripping, hallucinogenic haunted house novel as righteously angry as it is horrifying, Tell Me I'm Worthless unflinchingly lays bare the personal and cultural scars we wear, endure, and inflict.”

Hailey Piper, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth

“A lush masterpiece. Each page crackles with unnerving texture and unsettling sensation, and I felt chewed and digested by the end. Albion is the scariest haunted house since Hill House.”

Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt

“Chilling, bone-deep horror as humane as it is hideous. Tell Me I’m Worthless is ambitious, brutal, and brilliant.”

Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

“An utterly harrowing experience. Like all iconic masterworks of horror fiction, Tell Me I'm Worthless rips you apart and then tenderly pieces you together until you're something entirely new.”

Esquire

“novel for our time” is overused, but in this case, it’s entirely valid.”

Vulture

“Horrifying, provocative, and empathetic yet unflinching.”

Locus

“A hallucinogenic, powerful, transgressive novel that uncompromisingly goes into uncomfortable territory and then wallows there, digging deeper and deeper into the things that make us human, and eventually posits that love might be the way out of the things that trap us the hardest.”

Book Riot

“This amazing work of trans fiction about houses, hauntings, and horrors is going to be the horror book everyone is discussing next year.”

CrimeReads

“Intense…Rumfitt uses body horror and the tropes of the haunted house skillfully to explore the trans experience in an England full of terfs.”

Maya Deane, author of Wrath Goddess Sing

“Tell Me I'm Worthless is a defiant love letter to the lost, reminding us that win or lose, live or die, we can still save our souls by choosing love.”

Isabel Waidner, author of Sterling Karat Gold and We Are Made of Diamond Stuff

“An important book, as transgressive and trans as they come.”

Julia Armfield, author of Salt Slow and Our Wives Under the Sea

“A sharp and visceral novel which bends the horror genre to its will. Tell Me I’m Worthless holds a gruesome mirror up to the way it feels to live now. I absolutely tore through this book”

Eliza Clark, author of Boy Parts

“Punk in every sense of the word, this is a debut unlike anything you’ve read before. Rumfitt’s horrifying talent shrieks out from every page and rings in your ears for days.”

Lucie McKnight Hardy, author of Water Shall Refuse Them

“The most startlingly original haunted house story I have read, this is intense, multi-layered and very, very creepy.”

Molly Smith, co-author of Revolting Prostitutes

“Gripping, unsettling, compulsive, spicy, and, in the end, deeply moving. I loved it.”

Frankie Miren, author of The Service

“An exquisitely terrifying journey.... Alison Rumfitt’s astute observations of today’s violent cultural landscape work only too well as a tale of gothic horror. But Tell Me I’m Worthless is also full of beauty, empathy and, ultimately, love. I’ll never forget this book.”

Alice Ash, author of Paradise Block

“A deeply affecting and sharp-eyed book, Tell Me I’m Worthless collages and distorts the horror genre to create something truly unique, vastly compelling and very, very frightening.”

Gary Budden, author of London Incognita

“Alison Rumfitt’s superlative trans horror picks a fight with the poisonous state of modernity and fearlessly attacks it head on. Vital, thrilling, utterly alive.”

About the Author

ALISON RUMFITT is a writer, semi-professional trans woman, and the author of Tell Me I'm Worthless. Her debut pamphlet of poetry, The T(y)ranny, was a critical deconstruction of Margaret Atwood’s work through the lens of a trans woman navigating her own misogynistic dystopia. Tell Me I’m Worthless is her debut novel. Her work has appeared in countless publications such as SPORAZINE, datableed, The Final Girls, Burning House Press, SOFT CARTEL, Glass Poetry and more. Her poetry was nominated for the Rhysling Award in 2018. She loves her friends.

Reviews

News