Last to Leave the Room, Caitlin Starling
Last to Leave the Room, Caitlin Starling
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Last to Leave the Room
A Novel

Author: Caitlin Starling

Narrator: Xe Sands

Unabridged: 11 hr 51 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/10/2023

Synopsis

"With her deep and husky timbre, Xe Sands is the perfect reader for this horror/sf blend." —Booklist

Last to Leave the Room is a new novel of genre-busting speculative horror from Caitlin Starling, the acclaimed author of The Death of Jane Lawrence.

The city of San Siroco is sinking. The basement of Dr. Tamsin Rivers, the arrogant, selfish head of the research team assigned to find the source of the subsidence, is sinking faster.

As Tamsin grows obsessed with the distorting dimensions of the room at the bottom of the stairs, she finds a door that didn’t exist before - and one night, it opens to reveal an exact physical copy of her. This doppelgänger is sweet and biddable where Tamsin is calculating and cruel. It appears fully, terribly human, passing every test Tamsin can devise. But the longer the double exists, the more Tamsin begins to forget pieces of her life, to lose track of time, to grow terrified of the outside world.

As her employer grows increasingly suspicious, Tamsin must try to hold herself together long enough to figure out what her double wants from her, and just where the mysterious door leads…

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press.

About Caitlin Starling

Caitlin Starling is the nationally bestselling author of The Death of Jane Lawrence, the Bram Stoker-nominated The Luminous Dead, and Last To Leave The Room. Her newest novels The Starving Saints and The Graceview Patient epitomize her love of genre-hopping horror; her bibliography spans besieged castles, alien caves, and haunted hospitals. Her short fiction has been published by GrimDark Magazine and Neon Hemlock, and her nonfiction has appeared in Nightmare, Uncanny, and Nightfire. Caitlin also works in narrative design, and has been paid to invent body parts. She’s always on the lookout for new ways to inflict insomnia.

Reviews

Goodreads review by John on November 03, 2023

My complete review of Last to Leave the Room is published at Grimdark Magazine. Last to Leave the Room is the new dark speculative fiction by Caitlin Starling, the USA Today bestselling author of The Death of Jane Lawrence, which seamlessly blends science fiction and horror into a slow-building thril......more

Goodreads review by Susan Kay on March 14, 2025

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press for sending me a copy of this much anticipated book. That’s where the love ends for me unfortunately. I really didn’t like this. The text is so dense. I struggled so hard in the first third to get into the story with all the very boring and difficult to understand sci......more

Goodreads review by Rachel (TheShadesofOrange) on October 08, 2023

3.0 Stars I picked up this novel after enjoying The Luminous Dead. For me, the strength of the author's debut novel was the sense of suspense and atmosphere. This novel has a sense of unease and weirdness, but those feelings weren't as strongly projected. The story was mysterious, strange and ultimat......more

Goodreads review by Emms-hiatus(ish) on November 28, 2023

2.5 There is just enough going on that you keep reading to see how it ends, but once I got there, I found it to be ultimately unsatisfying. The science doesn't science like it should.......more

Goodreads review by Christina on October 08, 2023

Tamsin Rivers, researcher at Myrica Dynamic, knows it’s bad when when she discovers her basement is sinking much faster than the city of San Siroco. It’s even worse when she discovers a door appearing out of no where in her basement. A door is bad enough, but when an exact copy of herself steps out,......more

Quotes

"A taut, ominous gothic that plays with preconceptions of gender and genre alike. Starling illuminates her characters brilliantly, and isn't afraid of the dark corners behind them. This book runs like clockwork -- but it's unpredictable too, unnervingly so, like a machine finely calibrated to self-destruct. It reads like Shirley Jackson writing an episode of Severance." -- Isaac Fellman, author of Dead Collections and The Two Doctors Górski.

"A stylish and chilling technothriller, Last to Leave the Room had me rapt at every page. Starling once again succeeds with this tense, atmospheric tale of genius and hubris, one that will have readers question their sense of identity until the chilling end." -- Victor Manibo, author of The Sleepless

"No two Caitlin Starling books are the same, save for their intelligence, imagination, and compulsive readability. But with Last to Leave the Room, Starling has outdone herself. If, by the end of Chapter 3, you're not *desperate* to know what happens next, you're as baffling as non-Euclidean geometry." -- Nat Cassidy, author of Mary: An Awakening of Terror and Nestlings

 "A mad-scientist cautionary tale cloaked in unflinching dread, to read this book is to creep down the basement stairs in the dark toward bone-deep uncertainty. Last to Leave the Room is a page-turning genre-buster, carefully plotted and deeply frightening, with unexpected heart. I loved every moment."
—Katrina Monroe, author of They Drown Our Daughters

"A bow-taut psychological thriller, a virtuoso science fiction tale, and above all an unsqueamish exploration of identity, ambition, cruelty and memory. It's a terrifying combination of tension and imagination that could only have come from the mind of Caitlin Starling -- no one else working in speculative fiction could have executed this with such style and confidence."
— Nebula award-winning author Premee Mohamed

"Caitlin Starling's Last to Leave the Room is a masterclass in narrative tension. This is a terrifyingly compelling work of scifi horror that was impossible to look away from, even when I wanted to read with my hands mostly covering my eyes."
—Kat Howard, Alex Award-winning author of An Unkindness of Magicians

"Last to Leave the Room is a singularly fascinating book. Starling is a genius for the horrors of the physical and the interpersonal, and this book marries those two unique nightmares brilliantly." --Sarah Gailey, award-winning author of Just Like Home

“Caitlin Starling’s Last to Leave the Room is a twisty, reality-warping powerhouse of a novel. Absolutely riveting!” -Jonathan Maberry, NY Times bestselling author of Kagen the Damned and Cave 13

"Last to Leave the Room is unpretentious and incredibly readable--the kind of book that monopolizes your attention until you realize you've missed your bus stop. I think I finished it in two sittings, and I had fun, despite the fact it tickles that deep and terrified part of our lizard brains that recognizes the instability of our own identities, and deeply resents all the other, better versions of ourselves we could've been. Also, I'm a sucker for gruesome eyeball stuff." - Hiron Ennes, author of Leech

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