Review by halthemonarch - Tell Me I'm Worthless

halthemonarch 's review for:

Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt

1.75

challenging dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

The haunted house is fascism, and it wants Alice and Ila to come home. The story follows these two women, estranged after carving slurs into each other’s skin and violating one another. At first, you don’t know who is telling the truth, but later Alice points the finger at the audience for even debating on who to believe, who is most marginalized, and where your loyalties lie. Alice carved an antisemitic word into Ila, and Ila carved a vagina into Alice, a trans woman’s forehead, which she must cover with her bangs. She feels shame for who she is and how she gets off; the degradation is threaded throughout every part of her. Ila spends every moment first loving Alice and savoring how her body made her feel, and then, after they fell out, hating everything about the trans community thereafter. The house draws them back in to visit Hannah, a friend of theirs who had died gruesomely in the house, and who had hurled her fascistic vitriol at them before she became a part of the house forever. A lot of the story is in metaphor and big-long rant format, which I found hard to follow. It was like reading Ralph Ellison about gay stuff instead of black stuff.

Ugh. I have so many thoughts about this book, and I don’t think the majority of them are good. At some point,s I was like “ooh, bars,” and when I was reading the synopsis, I was like-- A horror novel where the haunted house is fascism and the protagonists succumb and pull each other apart in intimate ways because of “the house”? Hell yeah! But while I was in it, the thought that this should have been a poem or a short story instead kept popping into my mind. There were a lot of things that felt like they were in there for shock value or for the sake of being agitating in a gratuitous, uncomfortable way. There were literally pages of one blog post that felt like it went on forever, dumping on “trannies” and spewing hate. At first, I was on board because this haunted house is supposed to represent fascism, it’s supposed to be loud and annoying and in your face and oppressive and inescapable feeling, but as a piece of entertainment and stimulating media, I hated it. After a certain point, I felt myself slogging through it.

I was upset with the ending where all of Ila’s hate turned out to be internalized transphobia because Ila was Harry the whole time. I know the TERF turned trans man thing happens in real life but still, I certainly don't want to read about it. All of Alice’s antisemitism felt really gross as well, and also very surface-level. Rumfitt really gets her hands dirty with the book’s portrayal of homophobia and transphobia, but the antisemitism felt like the secondary opposition in the oppression olympics. Like it had to be marginalized group vs marginalized group, but the antisemitism was SHOCKING (the appearance of swastikas and the phrase “arbeit macht frei”) but nothing connecting those shocking things to what was happening in the story and how that contributed to the growth of fascism/the power of the haunted house. Like Alice hates herself and has a humiliation kink that sort of branches off from her being trans, but Ila’s Jewishness is never a point of contention.

In the end, I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. The house directs another person, a stranger in its clutches, to go to a pride parade with a bomb, and the book ends with Alice and Harry lightly injured and holding each other. Someone takes a picture, and this inspires people around the world, but on the other hand, fascism is still plotting to ensnare more people. To me, the metaphor is kind of thin when it’s a whole book and not something like a short story or a poem or a series of poems, because this book kind of implies that fascism is something that creeps into you without your control whatsoever. Agreeing with tenets of fascism can be a slippery slope and a dangerous pipeline, but the decisions someone makes to turn those beliefs outward in a harmful way are doing so of their own free will, not because they’ve succumbed to the almighty possession of the spirit of fascism. Hannah fell into fascism because her friends took her to it, and suddenly she admits (or is forced to say) that she’s always hated her friends for being worthless, disgusting bitches or whatever. Her friends assault each other in a dazed state, then meander out, one hateful of trans people, the other hateful of Jewish people, and neither able to square what really happened with reality. This takes the choices of the characters away, in my opinion. In The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Coriolanus Snow is given the choice to be decent or to keep his head down or even to look out for his fellow man and people who call him friends, but every time we’re shown, he chooses to dehumanize them and minimize his own actions. Over and over again, we see him pick himself and his goals, choosing to believe because he is an opportunist, everyone must be an opportunist. I think this is a much better way to write someone walking down the road of fascism. Like at the end of the movie The Zone of Interest (and in real life), Rudolph Hoss looks down the hallway and continues to descend those stairs of his own free will.

Content Warnings