Old Soul (2025) – The Horrors of Cosmic Immortality

In Old Soul by Susan Barker, an age-old question is given an eldritch twist: what – in grim honesty – would you do to live forever?

When two individuals from different worlds miss the same flight in Japan, they discover over dinner that they also share a similar past loss – they have both lost someone they cared for to strange and unexplainable circumstances. Jake, a schoolteacher from London, lost a girl he grew up with. Mariko, a business executive from Osaka, lost her estranged twin brother. Both had met a middle-aged woman before their death, both had then seemed to descend into a strange paranoid madness. And after they had died, it had been discovered that both suffered from a rare, congenital condition that had up to that point never been diagnosed in them – situs invertus, a defect where your internal organs are backwards, mirrored along your internal geography.

Jake follows this meeting back to Mariko’s widowed sister-in-law, and from there discovers a trail of deaths that goes back over a century fitting this same odd pattern. With each new case he uncovers, we learn more about the strange phenomenon that is destroying lives all over the world. Interspersed with this narrative are the “Badlands” chapters, following a woman we come to realize is the same one from our century spanning murder mystery as she lures an aspiring YouTube influencer into the New Mexico badlands. Seeing the story from her perspective, we find out she is dying and something she is about to do to her unwitting passenger is going to save her. With the context of all the testimony Jake has found, the reader is grimly aware that whatever is coming will not end well for the would-be influencer.

Literary Execution and Themes

Though Old Soul is billed as a literary horror novel (and it certainly earns that designations), it reads like a thriller or mystery with an eldritch twist that spreads it across multiple centuries. A significant portion of the plot is related through “testimonies”, Jake’s interviews of people familiar with the carnage wrought by the mystery woman as she travels through the world photographing victims who later go mad and die.

The story explores themes of legacy; the people targeted tended to already exist at the fringes of society, though they were all fascinating in their own right. Once they go mad and die, their stories quickly begin to fade into obscure history, preserved only second hand by the people who knew them. They leave nothing behind, except the strange photographs that are the catalyst for their destruction.

Meanwhile, our mysterious antagonist (who never appears under the same name twice) does not seem to ever age. Yet despite her apparent immortality, one significant plotline centers around her commissioning of a marble statue in her own likeness. In a fascinating irony, a deathless being has a greater than normal impulse to leave something of itself behind – to make some indelible mark on the universe that remains after even their magically maintained body is dust.

Also on this line of thought in the novel are conversations about longevity, both in terms of human lives and planetary epochs. We know that the ageless killer is dying, and that she has to offer up the lives of her victims to extend her own unnatural lifespan. She places her survival above the welfare of the people around her. We see parallels to that played out on a large scale in the aging of the world around the characters, people harming each other for status or rank, or even harming the earth itself. A parallel to that is visible in the allusions to the planet Venus, whose rise and fall are central to the eldritch ritual. Venus was once inhabitable and represents a feeling of entropy in the story.

The language in Old Soul is amazingly rendered, direct but gut wrenching in its descriptions. Though the stylistic choice to present the dialogue without quotation marks takes some getting used to, the voices of Barker’s characters are incredibly rendered.

Existential Dread Coupled With Visceral Horror

And importantly – it’s scary. Barker alternates existential horror and the fear of death in abstract with the more visceral, personal body horror of the cosmic entity. In a memorable passage she describes Jake discovering his childhood friend undergoing the possession that will eventually lead to his global search for answers:

“She pulled her T-shirt up above her navel. She hadn’t been eating much, and below her ribs her flesh was sunken and concave. I wasn’t sure what she wanted to show me. Then I saw a sudden bulge moving under her skin. Like a rat, tunneling about in the stomach of a corpse.

I dropped the torch. I fumbled with it again, hands shaking, but couldn’t get the light to turn back on. In the dark Lena wasn’t visible under the workbench, but I could hear her. The faint gurgling in her throat, and something else, coming from inside her. A squelching sound.”

Barker is masterful in the ratcheting of the tension without becoming overly predictable – at times, the violence can be sudden and intense. While it’s the mystery of Old Soul that draws you in, it’s the horror of what you discover that keeps you thinking about the book long after you’ve read the last page.