Tell Me I'm Worthless

Tell Me I'm Worthless

£9.99

A dark, unflinching haunted house novel that takes readers from the well of the literary gothic, up through Brighton’s queer scene, and out into the heart of modern day trans experience in the UK.

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Three years ago, Alice spent one night in an abandoned house with her friends Ila and Hannah. Since then, things have not been going well. Alice is living a haunted existence, selling videos of herself cleaning for money, going to parties she hates, drinking herself to sleep. She hasn’t spoken to Ila since they went into the House. She hasn’t seen Hannah either. 

Memories of that night torment her mind and her flesh, but when Ila asks her to return to the House, past the KEEP OUT sign, over the sick earth where teenagers dare each other to venture, she knows she must go. 

Together Alice and Ila must face the horrifying occurrences that happened there, must pull themselves apart from the inside out, put their differences aside, and try to rescue Hannah, who 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 confronts both supernatural and real-world horrors as it examines the devastating effects of trauma and the way fascism makes us destroy ourselves and each other.

Advance praise for Tell Me I’m Worthless:

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

"Punk in every sense of the word, this is a debut unlike anything you’ve read before. Tell Me I’m Worthless builds a thoroughly British haunted house, and terrorises its readers inside; Rumfitt’s horrifying talent shrieks out from every page and rings in your ears for days." 

Eliza Clark, author of Boy Parts

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

Lucie McKnight Hardy, author of Dead Relatives and Water Shall Refuse Them

“With Tell Me I'm Worthless, Alison Rumfitt establishes herself immediately as a prodigious horror talent, her insight so razor-sharp it left me cut to ribbons. Chilling, bone-deep horror as humane as it is hideous. Tell Me I'm Worthless is ambitious, brutal, and brilliant."

– Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt

“An exquisitely terrifying journey to the depths of fascist, transphobic Britain. Alison’s astute observations of today’s violent cultural landscape work only too well as a tale of gothic horror. But TMIW is also full of beauty, empathy and, ultimately, love. I’ll never forget this book.” – Frankie Miren, author of The Service

“Rumfitt’s is an important book, as transgressive and trans as they come. This is the sort of literature we haven’t seen in the UK for too long, if not ever”

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

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

Molly Smith, co-author of Revolting Prostitutes

“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.”

Alice Ash, author of Paradise Block

“There’s fascism in the rotten House of albion, and it’s getting worse… 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.”

Gary Budden, author of London Incognita