Susan Barker has written the rarest species of horror — the kind that does not chase you down a corridor but sits, patient and impeccably mannered, in the chair beside yours, and waits.
The architecture is what got me first. Rather than a single narrator, Barker assembles the novel out of testimony — a mosaic of strangers scattered across continents and decades, each circling, from their own grief and their own dread, the same impossible figure. A pattern surfaces the way a face surfaces in wallpaper at three in the morning: the people who vanish are always the luminous ones, the gifted, the beloved, the ones a room rearranges itself around. Something is moving through the world with exquisite taste, and it is hungry for precisely what we are.
What keeps this from being mere mechanism is that Barker is not, finally, writing about a monster. She is writing about mortality, and about the obscene bargain every last one of us would at least be tempted to strike if the right stranger named the right price. The horror is cosmic and the horror is domestic, and she refuses to let me decide which is worse. I finished it with every light in the apartment on and the unworthy, animal certainty that I had been reading about myself.
It sent me straight into her backlist — which is the highest compliment I know how to pay a writer. When a book ends and your only impulse is to go find everything else its author has ever touched, the spell has done its work.