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Susan Barker, Old Soul, Penguin, 2025. 352 pgs.
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In 2014, Susan Barker published The Incarnations, which The Independent described as “China’s Midnight’s Children.” Like her previous two novels, it was set in Asia and explored themes of the afterlife.
Whereas in those novels the supernatural remained ambiguous—possibly existing only in the characters’ imaginations—her latest work, Old Soul, fully embraces the occult. At its centre is an ageless woman who mercilessly shortens innocent lives to extend her own.
One character spends his time in prison writing letters to his deceased daughter, convinced she is reading them in Heaven. However, the afterlife in this novel is far from Christian. As in Barker’s earlier works—including Sayonara Bar, set in Japan—the cosmos appears to reward bad behaviour more than good.
At the start of Old Soul, Jake and Mariko meet by chance at Osaka Airport. After missing a flight, they drink together, and Mariko opens up about the bizarre death of her twin brother. The manner of his death is eerily similar to that of Jake’s best friend Lena, involving a mysterious female photographer and the rearrangement of internal organs.
Jake begins collecting testimonies from those who have lost loved ones at the hands of this woman, leading him across East Germany, Hungary, rural Wales, his native England, and finally the United States, where the novel’s climax unfolds.
Meanwhile, the woman is in New Mexico, ensnaring her latest victim—a down-at-heel young girl who believes manifestation will make her internet-famous. Jake is determined to track her down and prevent further deaths.
Compared to Barker’s earlier novels, the force of antagonism in Old Soul is all the more menacing for being largely absent. In the Wales-set section, she appears only once, leaving the characters to self-destruct in her wake.
Aside from Rosa, the aspiring YouTuber, the only victim with whom the woman forms a strong attachment is the sculptor Theo. Perhaps because Barker teaches in a creative writing department, the artistic Theo is one of her most finely drawn characters.
This novel—spanning continents and engaging with contemporary technology such as the dark web—marks a step forward for Barker, an admirer of David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas. While the historical sections of The Incarnations are brilliantly realised, they are structurally and tonally similar. The protagonist and antagonist repeatedly meet, with one inevitably causing the other’s demise. In Old Soul, each testimony section reinvents the antagonist, rendering her presence ever more unpredictable and sinister.
At the novel’s launch event in Manchester in February 2025, Barker mentioned that her sense of the afterlife was profoundly shaped by her Malaysian-Chinese heritage. Like her Asia-set novels, Old Soul explores themes of judgmental ancestors and the questionable legacies of modern lives. A chess game between two young people in Hungary is described as taking place “beneath the watchful gaze of older generations.”
The line-by-line writing is of the highest standard. Evoking the appearance of a character, Barker writes: “For a moment her striking appearance—her model’s bone structure and intense blue eyes—intimidated me. But her direct manner as she shook my hand gave the impression she didn’t care for performing femininity.”
The eponymous old soul, in her relentless quest for immortality, is Barker’s most chilling antagonist yet—though she is not entirely a villain. Meditating on the myth of progress and civilisation’s precarious state, she muses: “Part of her wants to stick around out of sheer voyeurism to see how far the conquering species will fall.”
Like Barker’s previous novels, Old Soul is a genuine page-turner. Marketed as horror, it is as ambitious and profound as any literary fiction being published today.
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How to cite: McGeary, Kevin. “Susan Barker’s Old Soul: A Globetrotting Horror with an Asian Sense of Eternity.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 3 Mar. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/03/03/soul.
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Kevin McGeary is a translator, Mandarin tutor and author. His short story collection The Naked Wedding was published in 2021. He is also a singer-songwriter who has written two albums of Chinese-language songs. [All contributions by Kevin McGeary.]