Tell Me I'm Worthless

By: Alison Rumfitt

Narrated by: Nicky Endres

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.

"Nicky Endres pulls out all the stops when performing this horror story about a haunted house and the shocking trauma it inflicts on three people...This is the stuff nightmares are made of..."—AudioFile Magazine (Earphones Award Winner)

"Narrator Nicky Endres narrates three distinct POVs (Alice, Ila, and the House), and her voice easily slithers between all three, demonstrating how the house dominates this story and the women’s lives."—Library Journal

"Transfeminine actor Nicky Endres’ narration is chilling throughout, as they voice the perspectives of Alice, Ila, and the house at an easy, relaxed pace. Their voice maintains a lulling and melodious sing-song quality, which acts in opposition to the horrors portrayed in the book."—Booklist

“A triumph of transgressive queer horror.”—Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

“Easily one of the strongest horror debuts in recent memory.”—Booklist, STARRED review

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.

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.

“Ambitious, brutal, and brilliant.”—Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt

©2023 Alison Rumfitt (P)2023 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

“Easily one of the strongest horror debuts in recent memory, and essential reading not only for anyone interested in horror writing, but for anyone interested in, for want of a better term, the ‘trans novel.’”—Booklist, STARRED review

“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.”—Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World and The Pallbearers Club

“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.”—Hailey Piper, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth

Amazing Book

Beautifully sad representation of todays world. Could not stop listening, a must read book. Very dark and thoughtful. I absolutely loved it.

Haunting

It's horrifying, smart, brutal and it'll stick with you for days afterward. Be forewarned, the content warnings before the start are there for a reason. Do not take them lightly.

Laytex maid

Chapter 7 alone should be enough for this to be greatest books of all time. That internet post should be the sample you get to listen to before buying. But in seriousness it is a great book and well written.

Brutal and Beautiful

The stream of consciousness prose buffered the traumatic sequences for me. The narration was superb. I will be mulling this one for a while.

Should be 5 stars but …I physically can’t

This burnt the edges of my soul. It tore me apart. It punched me so hard I feel the bruises but see no scars. I…am…broken.
And yet….
This is the hate we push through like globs of mucus surrounding and infecting us.

I will be better than this world, I will brighten this world, I will form this world into the safe and beautiful place it can be.

It will take my blood. It will take your blood. We will all be haunted…but we can make things better for the next generation….and the planet. We can.
Should be 5 stars but my stomach won’t let me make something so torturous an image of perfection thus…I settle for four….knowing what it deserves.

WOW

This audiobook was very well done; narration superb. 🤌

This was dark and very unsettling. You will need a palate cleansing afterward to get the dark out of you
(r/eyebleach or something).

This. Is. Horror. Fascism is a nightmare creeping more and more into the everyday modern world. TMIW brings it in and it feels like an illness--like a sickness that creeps inside of you and makes you doubt everything. And, there's the house! "The house is salivating... " Oh, that sentence brought a gross and unsettling visual to my mind that just stayed there.

Have you ever been online and came across a wall of text in which someone has just spilled their hate and mental illness into your eyeballs? Have you ever been part of the demographic the hate was aimed at? Whether or not you have, Alison Rumfitt will throw you into the utter helplessness of that pit of dispair, and when she's done, the feeling of relief you get when the scene is over is real.

This was heavy and great, and I will definitely be reading it again. But, in print this time... because this audio book was just sooo intense.

OMG

everything was so perfect! this story left my mouth open and the narrator did so great! 5 stars

Great

Don’t usually write reviews but came here to express that (1) the voice actor did an absolutely incredible job. Wow, stunning. (2) a great work overall, stylistically interesting, lots of critical thinking and symbolism. A brave first book (I think it was her first book?)

Just a note that this book was rough and tough to hear/read in places. But there’s a lot of thought provoking content that I’ll be working out in my mind for a while. I needed to take this slow and take breaks from the traumatic pieces. I saw someone say that the disjointed parts buffered the trauma for them, and for me I think it amplified it. Just good to take care of yourselves while reading.

Great Narration - Wonderful Story

The narrator was fantastic and I appreciated their articulation - their voice was also wonderful to listen to.

The story was fantastic and touched on so many themes and topics of true horror and evil through fascism. I would give the story an overall 5 stars, but the beginning was slow, and seemed to really focus on the feeling the characters had around a room. After the story started to progress it was hard to stop listening.

Not what I expected

This one took me a while to read. I went in for a read about a haunted house, which ended up being a minor part of the story. It is a heavy read about being trans in the UK, fascism, politics, hate, racism, religious discrimination and all sorts of heavy subjects. The narrative is written in jarring form, slurs and explicit language used as a tool to bring the reader into the world of an #ownvoice author. It is a good read, just not what I was prepared for.