It’s an at times transgressive, hallucinatory, and frenetic novel, but one which is nonetheless lucid in its treatment of its themes: the resurgent threat of fascism, the absurdities inherent to contemporary transphobia, and the way that trauma, rather than being a learning opportunity, can make people twisted and cruel. Tell Me I’m Worthless refracts similar themes, but through the lens of horror and pitch-black comedy. There have been some excellent non-fiction books published about the trans experience recently: for instance, The Transgender Issue by Shon Faye and Transgender Marxism, edited by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke. When it eventually succeeds, the novel reaches an explosive climax.
The house functions as a metaphor for a particularly English form of fascism, and exerts a Mephistophelian influence on the characters it whispers in their ears, appealing to their worst impulses and most reactionary anxieties, doing everything in its power to lure them to return. Three years before the story begins, Alice and Illa (along with their friend Hannah, now missing) spent an evening in a decrepit mansion on the outskirts of the city, where they experienced a brutally violent incident. The sections of the book which concern Ila’s journey through the world of anti-trans activism make for a lacerating, sharply-observed satire.īut this is, above all, a horror novel, and a haunted house looms large.
Ila, meanwhile, has become a committed ‘gender critical’ activist: she attends meetings, appears on Radio 4 to discuss the importance of single-sex spaces, and boasts a number of anti-trans celebrities as followers on Twitter. As a first-person narrator, she is bitter and acerbic, prone to erudite digressions on the nature of fascism and the conventions of the ghost story genre. Alice is a trans woman who scrapes a living through online sex work and drifts through Brighton’s house party scene. Tell Me I’m Worthless concerns the wreckage of a friendship between two characters – Alice and Ila – both of whom are hateful at times but ultimately redeemable. To blend genre without one aspect diminishing the other is a difficult feat to pull off, and made more impressive by the fact that, after beginning her career as a poet, this is Rumfitt’s debut novel. It’s a satire that’s actually funny and a horror novel that’s actually scary. If the idea of someone being haunted by an evil Morrissey poster sounds funny, that’s because it’s intended to be – but as the novel progresses, it becomes genuinely creepy, too. Every night, the disgraced frontman of a 1980s indie band (unnamed but unmistakable) crawls out from the poster which confines him and stands over Alice’s bed, his eyes blacked out with biro and radiating malevolent intent. Alice, the protagonist of Alison Rumfitt’s debut novel Tell Me I’m Worthless, is haunted by a curious phantom.
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