"Last to Leave the Room"

Caitlin Starling is the bestselling and award-winning author of The Death of Jane Lawrence and The Luminous Dead. She writes genre-hopping horror and speculative fiction.

Starling applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Last to Leave the Room, and reported the following:

From page 69:

Lachlan Woodfield’s name glows in the midnight dark.

Tamsin sits at her dining room table, alone. She stares down at her phone, hands clawing against her scalp. Her braid hangs half-undone, hair tangling under her clenching fingertips. She’s shaking again, has been shaking since she got out of the basement and hasn’t stopped once. There’s a sweating gin and tonic at her elbow. She hasn’t taken a single sip.

It was stupid, locking the thing downstairs. Her laptop is down there. All her equipment is down there. The damn door is down there, and who knows what else might come through it. Can the thing open it at will? It must be able to. Anything else…

What? Doesn’t make sense?

None of this makes sense.

Maybe, when she unlocks the basement, the thing will be gone. Left, or never existed at all. The unhinged imaginings of an overwrought mind. It didn’t work with the door, but she wants to believe now. Needs to.

But if it’s still there, she needs a plan.

Lachlan would come if she called. She can see it clearly: Lachlan on her doorstep, black gloves in place, as always. Lachlan, gun in hand, ready as Tamsin unlocks the basement. Or maybe she’d use a knife; a gunshot would wake the neighbors, and Lachlan is nothing if not mindful about appearances. About management.

Lachlan can fix this.

Myrica Dynamics will spread that thing wearing her face out in a lab somewhere. And she’ll be right there with them, cutting into its flesh. She doesn’t have the medical training, but she’d insist.

The actual page 69 in Last to Leave the Room is the start of a new section of the book, titled, THE DOUBLE. Very relevant, but lacking a bit of meat! So I jumped ahead to the first page of text after that, where our protagonist, Dr. Tamsin Rivers, is trying to decide what the hell she’s going to do about her doppelganger, who has just walked out of a door that didn’t exist a week ago, in her basement that is rapidly distorting in dimensions, all of which she has concealed from her employer’s “problem solver”, Lachlan Woodfield.

This page is a perfect encapsulation of Tamsin’s character: obsessive, stressed, and determined to find a way to be in control of the uncontrollable. This isn’t the first time she’s been tempted to call Lachlan for help, but each time, the uncertainty of what Lachlan will do to her inevitably isolates Tamsin that little bit more. Here, finally, she seems poised to reach out. But will she?

We also get a tantalizing glimpse of the doppelganger, which Tamsin considers a “thing”-- not a person. That dehumanizing remove is half self-defense, half arrogant exceptionalism. Tamsin’s relationship with her doppelganger is proprietary; it’s wearing her face, but even without training, she feels as if she deserves to help in its dissection. Yikes!

Here, at the start of this new section of the book, we have Tamsin isolated and about to make a decision that could unravel her entire life. So will she call Lachlan? Or will she decide, once and for all, to fix her problems herself?

Visit Caitlin Starling's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Luminous Dead.

The Page 69 Test: The Death of Jane Lawrence.

--Marshal Zeringue