Last to Leave the Room

A Novel

By: Caitlin Starling

Narrated by: Xe Sands

"With her deep and husky timbre, Xe Sands is the perfect reader for this horror/sf blend."—Booklist

Last to Leave the Room is a new novel of genre-busting speculative horror from Caitlin Starling, the acclaimed author of The Death of Jane Lawrence.

The city of San Siroco is sinking. The basement of Dr. Tamsin Rivers, the arrogant, selfish head of the research team assigned to find the source of the subsidence, is sinking faster.

As Tamsin grows obsessed with the distorting dimensions of the room at the bottom of the stairs, she finds a door that didn’t exist before—and one night, it opens to reveal an exact physical copy of her. This doppelgänger is sweet and biddable where Tamsin is calculating and cruel. It appears fully, terribly human, passing every test Tamsin can devise. But the longer the double exists, the more Tamsin begins to forget pieces of her life, to lose track of time, to grow terrified of the outside world.

As her employer grows increasingly suspicious, Tamsin must try to hold herself together long enough to figure out what her double wants from her, and just where the mysterious door leads…

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press.

©2023 Caitlin Starling (P)2023 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"Xe Sands's eerie performance beckons listeners into this horror story.... Sands's vocal fry and emotional tone will keep listeners on edge as Tamsin becomes more and more obsessed with the door in her basement.... Sands's unsettling performance and consistent pacing are remarkable." (AudioFile)

"A taut, ominous gothic that plays with preconceptions of gender and genre alike. Starling illuminates her characters brilliantly, and isn't afraid of the dark corners behind them. This book runs like clockwork—but it's unpredictable too, unnervingly so, like a machine finely calibrated to self-destruct. It reads like Shirley Jackson writing an episode of Severance."—Isaac Fellman, author of Dead Collections and The Two Doctors Górski.

"A stylish and chilling technothriller, Last to Leave the Room had me rapt at every page. Starling once again succeeds with this tense, atmospheric tale of genius and hubris, one that will have readers question their sense of identity until the chilling end."—Victor Manibo, author of The Sleepless

"No two Caitlin Starling books are the same, save for their intelligence, imagination, and compulsive readability. But with Last to Leave the Room, Starling has outdone herself. If, by the end of Chapter 3, you're not *desperate* to know what happens next, you're as baffling as non-Euclidean geometry."—Nat Cassidy, author of Mary: An Awakening of Terror and Nestlings

It’s an entanglement problem

I dug it. This was more scifi than the author’s other works, and without spoilers I wanted more of that scifi exploration into the subsidence than the horror at the center of the story. But I can’t deny I was hooked and enjoyed my time. Good performance, I liked the main character being a kind of cold boss bitch, and I was intrigued by the scifi.

Very weird, more sci-fi than horror

This is one of those books where the narrator is constantly in their head second guessing themselves. I keep listening because I wanted to know the ending but I really didn’t enjoy it.

Strange, Boring Storyline

I just didn’t get it. It was so boring. The description mentioned some unexpected twist and I kept reading and reading, waiting for something interesting to happen, something exciting to make it worth reading but that moment never came. The ending was so bland, I was just happy that the story was over and I could start reading something else.
It didn’t help that the narrator’s voice was hard to get used to, it just didn’t work for me.