Nov 29, 2023
Caitlin Starling returns to Fictitious to talk about her new horror-tinged, sci-fi thriller, LAST TO LEAVE THE ROOM. We talk writing surreal scenes, and using a "load-bearing cat".
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…
LAST TO LEAVE THE ROOM is potent and surreal, horror-inflected science fiction available now from St. Martin’s Press:
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Caitlin Starling is the nationally bestselling author of The Death of Jane Lawrence, as well as Last to Leave the Room and the Bram Stoker-nominated The Luminous Dead. Her other works include Yellow Jessamine and a Vampire: The Masquerade novella, The Land of Milk and Honey (published in the collection Walk Among Us). Her nonfiction has appeared in Nightmare, Uncanny, and Tor Nightfire. Caitlin also works in narrative design, and has been paid to invent body parts.