Susan Barker’s new novel Old Soul starts with two strangers getting stranded in Osaka airport after missing their flight, but rather than the start of a Lost In Translation-type romance, something surreal and sinister follows, with a stench of death and decay.
In Osaka, Jake and Mariko reveal to each other that they have both experienced something both traumatic and similar in their pasts: Jake lost his best friend Lena, Mariko her brother Hiroji, in horrifying circumstances that each involved a strange, dark-haired female photographer who befriended them both, but disappeared without a trace just after each grisly death.
As a result, Jake sets out to find this photographer and discover what lies at the heart of her dark quest. Old Soul alternates between Jake’s testimonies, collected from those that share their nightmarish stories of loss at the hands of this deadly camera-carrying drifter, and chapters in which a teenage girl is befriended by this same traveller in the New Mexico desert.
An excerpt from Old Soul won a Northern Writers’ award for fiction in 2020, and digested as a whole this is an intelligent, nuanced, globe- and era-spanning horror epic.
