A not-quite-vampire villain whom you can’t quite hate

The hunt for immortality might be as outdated as humanity’s growth of self-consciousness, and so it’s no shock that artwork continues to have interaction in a method or one other with the long-lived and the undead. The vampire style appears to by no means exit of fashion.

Whereas such tales’ tropes could be helpful, after all, they will additionally overwhelm a story and switch it bland, as in my not too long ago disappointing expertise with the latest 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 girl who (gasp!) enjoys intercourse generally.

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

After a short prologue set in 1982 (which turns into significant later within the e-book), the primary chapter, “Testimony 1—Mariko,” opens with Jake, the narrator, assembly Mariko by probability once 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 together with her. A really managed, buttoned-up form of individual, Mariko is aware of she’s usually 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 he or she has a drink for the primary time in years. After which one other, and one other.

When Jake helps her to her lodge 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 demise, she started to have nightmares about working in a bamboo forest, one thing evil chasing her. She knew that one thing dangerous was occurring 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 mistaken approach round? Reversed?” Mariko confirms this, shocked and disturbed. That is how Jake discovers that the demise of his finest good friend 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 demise 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 individual’s story that lead him to seek out the subsequent. What he learns in these fascinating testimonies — every introducing an entire solid of characters and circumstances and studying in some methods like self-contained brief tales — is that every of the individuals who had been reversed once they died met a girl within the weeks beforehand, though she by no means appeared to present the identical title twice. She was all the time a stranger to the realm, often a foreigner, who was charismatic and interesting and who took a deep, private curiosity in them and shared intimacies — emotional or sexual, generally each — with them. And each time, after their encounters together with her had been over, these folks modified in methods neither they nor these round them may perceive. The main points are finest left for the reader to find and relish, as they’re splendidly unsettling but one way or the other scrumptious as effectively.

The chapters that alternate with the testimonies are titled “Badlands” and observe that unusual lady — 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 way in which, the girl activates the allure, regardless of her rising bodily discomfort, which incorporates E. coli in her urinary tract, hair loss and a burning scalp, and “enamel loosening as micro organism work beneath the gums — microbial time bombs ticking deep in periodontal sockets.”

Barker ups the stress 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 finally questions how free the girl 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 lady is, in a approach, the villain of the piece, it’s onerous to not like her; she’s a compelling character who has, as she places it, made residing into an artwork kind — how she does it’s refreshingly particular, unusual and authentic. “Previous Soul” is a totally pleasurable learn.

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