Book Review: Susan Barker returns with ‘Old Soul,’ a thrilling horror story that defies description

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If you read enough, you sometimes come across a book that defies description. That’s a decent enough way to start a review of “Old Soul,” the new novel by Susan Barker. Described in marketing materials as “literary horror,” it’s a supernatural mystery that culminates in an old-fashioned chase scene in the Badlands of New Mexico that almost leaves readers with a sense of justice. Almost.

It’s slow at first, as you adjust to the unique style. Seven of the 15 chapters are prefaced with the word “Testimony,” and you soon piece together that the first-person narrator, Jake, is talking to people who died in a similar fashion as his childhood friend, Lena. He’s recording their stories, trying to find connections, in his hunt for the killer. How he got to this point and the things he learned along the way are revealed in subsequent chapters, with each testimony — from friends or family of victims in Japan, Germany, Wales, and Hungary — standing on their own as short stories about how a shape shifting woman entered someone’s life and left a trail of death in her wake. Interspersed with the testimonies are chapters set in New Mexico, in 2022, as the killer — she calls herself Therese in this encounter — pursues her latest victim.

Barker drips out details, heightening your expectations and forcing you to turn the page for answers. We learn early on that the woman in each of the testimonies is something more than human. “She was unnatural… she could manipulate her face to any affect… her entire being was a perfidious mask of surging life, behind which lurked something not-living and predatory.” But we’re also told stories in each of the testimonies about how the woman treated her victims with such kindness that it’s hard not to work up a little sympathy for her. The penultimate chapter, “Testimony 7 — Theo,” soars with excerpts from the journal of a sculptor who embarks on a torrid love affair with the woman after leaving New York City in her mid-20 to pursue her artistic career in New Mexico.

She finds much more than that, of course, and so do we, as readers. Some may not like the exposition near the end, and many will probably Google the term “Luciferian,” but Barker tells an immersive story that despite its supernatural grounding feels real.

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