A not-quite-vampire villain whom you’ll be able to’t fairly hate

The search for immortality might be as previous as humanity’s improvement of self-consciousness, and so it’s no shock that artwork continues to interact in a method or one other with the long-lived and the undead. The vampire style appears to by no means exit of favor.

Whereas such tales’ tropes could be helpful, after all, they’ll additionally overwhelm a story and switch it bland, as in my just lately disappointing expertise with the most recent iteration of “Nosferatu,” which took its silent movie supply materials — which manages to convey the unhappy, pathetic, deeply lonely nature of its bloodthirsty villain — and added completely nothing of curiosity, as a substitute relying solely on excessive cheekbones, menacing music, a foolish accent and a lady who (gasp!) enjoys intercourse typically.

It was with particular pleasure, then, that on the heels of that movie I learn “Outdated Soul” by Susan Barker. The novel isn’t a few vampire, precisely, but it surely does heart on one girl’s quest for immortality and the lives she takes as a way to maintain her personal. It’s as a lot about her victims and the ripples of loss they depart behind within the type of grief-stricken family and friends. Jake is considered one of these, and alternating chapters take the type of testimonies he’s accumulating as he makes an attempt to unravel the thriller of who this girl is and what she’s been doing and why.

After a quick prologue set in 1982 (which turns into significant later within the guide), the primary chapter, “Testimony 1—Mariko,” opens with Jake, the narrator, assembly Mariko by likelihood after they’re each late for a flight leaving Osaka. They stumble upon one another once more later, each staying close to the airport to take the subsequent flight out within the morning, and Mariko invitations Jake to share a meal along with her. A really managed, buttoned-up form of particular person, Mariko is aware of she’s typically seen as chilly, and but one thing about Jake, or perhaps the circumstances (lacking a flight isn’t the form of factor that occurs to her) permits her to loosen up and she or he has a drink for the primary time in years. After which one other, and one other.

When Jake helps her to her resort room, Mariko, drunk and confessional, begins to inform him about her twin brother, Hiroji, who died in 2011. Though they stopped talking as youngsters, their psychic bond remained, and within the weeks main as much as his loss of life, she started to have nightmares about operating in a bamboo forest, one thing evil chasing her. She knew that one thing unhealthy was taking place to Hiroji.

And, certainly, he referred to as her the evening earlier than he died, informed her he’d “entered the thoughts of a higher-dimensional god” and warned her to not open the door for anybody that evening. The following morning, he was useless. Jake is shaken by Mariko’s confession and asks whether or not Hiroji’s post-mortem revealed something odd. “Have been his inner organs the improper method round? Reversed?” Mariko confirms this, surprised and disturbed. That is how Jake discovers that the loss of life of his greatest buddy rising up, Lena, was not a novel, remoted thriller. Right here was one other one that misplaced somebody who not solely appeared to go mad earlier than loss of life however who additionally skilled this bizarre bodily distortion.

So begins Jake’s not-so-wild goose chase, making an attempt to trace down different folks whose family members had been left reversed after their deaths, discovering clues in every particular person’s story that lead him to search out the subsequent. What he learns in these fascinating testimonies — every introducing a complete forged of characters and circumstances and studying in some methods like self-contained brief tales — is that every of the individuals who had been reversed after they died met a lady within the weeks beforehand, though she by no means appeared to provide the identical title twice. She was all the time a stranger to the world, normally a foreigner, who was charismatic and interesting and who took a deep, private curiosity in them and shared intimacies — emotional or sexual, typically each — with them. And each time, after their encounters along with her had been over, these folks modified in methods neither they nor these round them may perceive. The small print are greatest left for the reader to find and relish, as they’re splendidly unsettling but by some means scrumptious as effectively.

The chapters that alternate with the testimonies are titled “Badlands” and comply with that unusual girl — it’s clear early on that it’s her — as she drives Rosa, a 17-year-old would-be religious influencer, to the Bisti Badlands in New Mexico with the promise of serving to her shoot a video and a few pictures within the eerie panorama. On the best way, the lady activates the attraction, regardless of her rising bodily discomfort, which incorporates E. coli in her urinary tract, hair loss and a burning scalp, and “tooth loosening as micro organism work beneath the gums — microbial time bombs ticking deep in periodontal sockets.”

Barker ups the strain one bit at a time, unspooling the horrors slowly whereas sustaining a agency grasp on the emotional stakes inside every sufferer’s narrative. Whereas the novel in the end questions how free the lady actually is, all its different characters are additionally confined in myriad methods. Maybe that’s the human situation, no matter how lengthy an individual lives. And though the many-named girl is, in a method, the villain of the piece, it’s arduous to not like her; she’s a compelling character who has, as she places it, made dwelling into an artwork type — how she does it’s refreshingly particular, unusual and unique. “Outdated Soul” is a completely pleasurable learn.

Ilana Masad, a books and tradition critic, is the creator of the novel “All My Mom’s Lovers” and the forthcoming “Beings.”