The horror at the heart of Old Soul was unexpected and interesting. While reading this book, I felt like I had travelled to so many different places and times. Susan Barker’s ability to describe and build various environments seemed effortless. I didn't enjoy the final chapter although I understood why she did it.

At the heart of Old Soul is the mysterious woman. Ageless, undying and in thrall to a Lovecraftianesque entity. Who is she? Where did she come from? That's what Jake aims to discover following a chance encounter. The narrative is split between the testaments of those who Jake encounters in his quest to locate the woman and her latest hunt. It's in the former that Old Soul really comes alive, with each of the testaments almost strong enough to stand on its own apart from the larger narrative. The latter unfortunately isn't as effective with the hunt being overlong and also because I just didn't care about the woman's latest prey, wannabe influencer Rosa. It's also a shame we found out pretty much everything about the woman, it would have been nice if she'd been left with some mystique by book's end.

Thanks to NetGalley, Penguin Fig Tree and the author for advance copy.

Thank you for a free copy for a review but sadly not my style of book. I got confused by the pacing and couldn't quite get back on it.

Interesting. Obviously well written but also engaging. The first time in a long time that I could not stop reading. A lot of books that end up being heavily marketed are not this good. The slow reveal of the antagonist was well done. Equally impressive was the character building of persons of varied genders and races. The exception being Jake, but perhaps this was purposeful in that he was merely to act as a cypher to not get in the way of the testimonies at the heart of the story. Some impressive evocative imagery is also present - the description of the portrait of Ursula and the evil presence embedded. The Hungarian date night outfit. Although, in my view, the most depressing testimony, I did enjoy the Welsh father's almost comical dislike of his daughter's teenage best friend.
A thoroughly good read, if a little uneven towards the end as the epilogue felt a bit too much.

"Ambiguous signs in horror are so unnerving because it's the stuff we encounter in our everyday lives"
I picked Old Soul after reading the tag line “The woman never goes by the same name. She never stays in the same place too long. She never ages. She never dies. But those around her do.” I went in expecting something akin to the Grudge or similar but got something completely different. The story starts with two random strangers who meet after missing a plane. The pair find out that they share the same disturbing tragedy. The story proceeds to tell the tale of a mysterious woman and a decades long list of people she has encounter and who have passed on after their meeting. The tale is told through multiple perspectives and a twisting time line. I very much enjoyed this, it might not have been what I expect but it was definitely something I needed to read.

Terrifyingly brilliant
A creepy story that will keep you turning the pages and looking over your shoulder. I definitely recommend reading with the light on!
The characters are intriguing and the ending is absolutely unforgettable.

Ambitious literary horror that lingers
—
There’s a Korean urban myth that when someone changes too much, they’ll die. In Barker’s eerie literary horror, seemingly unconnected narrators tell stories of friends and loved ones who changed subtly before terrible things happened to them. In each case, the presence of a mysterious woman is harbinger of all that turns dark.

With a complex braid of narrators telling eerily similar tales, the horror builds until the truth begins to seep out, and unfortunately, so does the tension. Knowing the mechanism of the horror, it deflates its effect, however, the book lingers because it is so well written. The plot falters near the end and as this is literary horror, not everyone gets out alive.

Three and a half stars.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this new literary horror novel. It starts with an intriguing premise and mesmerising writing, but it loses momentum a little in the middle and the end left me with mixed feelings.

Jake and Mariko meet in airport by chance, but they discover the have something very unusual in common. They’ve both lost someone suddenly, in strange, disturbing circumstances. And, what seems to connect the two deaths is that both the deceased met and befriended a mysterious, mesmerising woman. They allowed her into their lives. They allowed her to take their photograph.

So Jake embarks on a mission to find out more about the strange woman. He travels the world to meet people who’ve lost loved ones in similar circumstances. He collects their stories, building testimonies on a mission to track down the woman at the heart of it all.

“Smoke and mirrors masquerading as some kind of femme fatale, when the truth was far more monstrous.”

The testimonies span the globe, leading a trail through the pain and destruction the woman leaves in her wake, each story dark, disturbing and – ultimately – tragic. It’s a clever way to capture the horror of the woman through different people’s eyes, and some of them make powerful short horror stories in their own right. But, moving between characters and places so much did mean that I didn’t get as absorbed in the narrative as I’d have hoped; they start to feel more like short vignettes, disconnected but also a little repetitive at times.

These are interspersed with an ongoing narrative, titled Badlands, which follow the woman herself, as she battles her own issues with her power and struggles to keep her latest victim compliant.

There isn’t a lot of outright horror in this book, but it’s dark and disturbing in a quiet way which gets under the skin. I was intrigued to know where it was all leading, but the ending left me feeling lost and unsettled. Maybe that was the author’s aim.

This book had a unique premise that kept me intrigued, but the disappointing ending and epilogue dropped my rating from three stars to two. The story alternates between Jake, a gay traveler investigating a string of eerie deaths linked to a mysterious woman, and Rosa, a teenage influencer unknowingly caught in the web of an ancient evil known as The Tyrant. While it leans more toward supernatural suspense than true horror, the plot felt overly drawn out, and the characters lacked depth. Though others may love its eerie atmosphere, it didn’t quite work for me—thanks to NetGalley and Penguin UK for the ARC.

How to review this novel without spoilers. This book had me closing the curtains and looking over my shoulder. I may navel look at photographs the same way again! A slow burn that ramped up the suspense until the epilogue which was mind blowing . Not my normal genre but I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. The characters were well drawn and the horror that slowly enveloped them was truly evil. I will certainly be searching through this authors backlist. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC of this novel in return for an honest review.

2.5 ⭐️ and honestly it pains me to give the book such a low rating. The first half of the book was kinda amazing (it even gave me some creepy dreams since i love reading before bed), but the second half was just.. a bit boring. The diary-like chapters did not work for me. The actual ending and epilogue was amazing again though. The writing was good but.. the lack of quotation marks? Honestly this was an absolute crime and made it barely readable sometimes.

With thanks to netgalley

Old Soul sound like a very good book and would be the type of book that I would pick up in the bookshop. It started off okay with a good spooky opening, but half way though the book it lost it, becoming more a thriller thana horror story, I plugged on to the end but by this time I just didn't care too much about any the of the characters.

This is such a strange book, it kept me engaged and I had been leaning towards 3 stars, but the ending and epilogue were so disappointing after the build up, that I dropped it back to 2 stars.
In selecting this book I had not noticed the 'horror' tag, so I am not in the target audience.
The story is told in two 'parts', one is by Jake, a young gay traveller, who by chance meets a Japanese woman at the Osaka airport. He discovers that her brother died in similar strange, and inexplicable circumstances as his best friend Leah. He then sets about tracking other people who have died in a similar way and documenting the person who seemed to bring about these deaths.
The other part of the story, is the present, with 'Therese' the evil entity reeling in another victim, seventeen year old Rosa who wants to be a social influencer.
The story isn't what I would call true 'horror' but circles an evil presence referred to as 'The Tyrant' and a woman who keeps reinventing herself as a new identity every time she makes an offering to 'The Tyrant'.
Others have loved this book, but for me it went on far too long, the characters were too shallow and the story too unbelievable.
Thank you Netgalley and Penguin UK for the opportunity to read this digital ARC.

44% and DNF - was hard to follow, didn’t care about anything that happened. The start was interesting enough but it wasn’t enough to keep going until the end. Just wasn’t my thing. Thanks NetGalley for the ARC.

Old Soul sucked me in from the very first pages and although the book is not scary-scary, I found it very eerie and wouldn’t read it too late at night. I really enjoyed the concept of the Luciferian pact combined with a curse like in The Ring. The research was absolutely INSANE and made the book so, so good, along with the writing style - it was super readable and unputdownable. The story began to drag a little bit towards the end, but I loved the epilogue as the story got so brilliantly wrapped up.

Currently I am taking part in my local library’s ‘Book Bingo’ challenge for 2025. One of the categories within the challenge, to read 12 books over 12 months, is to read a book from a genre I would never normally read. Susan Barker’s book ‘Old Soul’ definitely fits that description as ‘horror’ is not something that I would normally gravitate towards. I had, however, heard several recommendations for this book along with praise for Susan Barker’s previous novel ‘The Incarnations’; it had also been listed as ‘literary fiction’ and so I decided I would read her latest novel.
In short, this book is unlike anything I have ever read! The book opens through a chance meeting between Jake and Mariko at an airport. What initially felt like a romance gone wrong, turned into something completely different. Over the course of an evening the pair discover that they have a grisly connection. Namely Mariko’s twin brother and Jake’s friend died in the same brutal and mysterious way and both have been traumatised by the nature of their loved ones particular death. The novel’s narrative then splits to a ‘real time’ encounter between Rosa, a twenty something social media influencer and the mysterious woman who we realise is the individual connecting Jake and Mariko’s narratives. We then span across different time and places, different people and with different narratives but come to realise that despite these differences the thing connecting them is this particular woman. She has different names and different looks; however, she remains the constant and she means real harm.
It was a deeply unsettling book, intensified by the woman’s present ritual with Rosa being interspersed between stories of previous individuals whose lives she had changed and destroyed irrevocably. To be this close to the ‘old soul’ and having your knowledge grow of their misdeeds added a real tension to this story as we know Rosa’s fate is not going to be a happy one, we become complicit in the process. We as readers, along with Jake want to work out if there is a way to make it stop or at least find out how this woman came to be. Every time we meet a new character and begin a new story there is the same fatal inevitability and impending doom that fills the pages and we feel powerless to stop it.
Once we reach the end of the story, in what feels like a climactic horror movie moment, a lot of questions remain. It did not feel as cathartic as I had hoped but perhaps that is the point. This novel does not provide much comfort and at times is particularly grisly. It was, for me, a really unique reading experience and one that I will not forget for a long time.

Great plot and had me hooked from the first Chapter.

I did however struggle with the POV twists and turns. I really had to concentrate.

There are many weird ideas in this novel which had my brain in overdrive .

Definitely a book to put on your list if you enjoy literary horror.

Thanks to the UK publisher for the proof.

Susan Barker's Old Soul is a captivating blend of Gothic horror and mystery, weaving historical intrigue with modern settings. Each chapter is a standalone tale that contributes to a larger, eerie narrative.

While I yearned for a more resonant conclusion, Old Soul is an immersive read that will appeal to fans of literary horror. It's hauntingly good, even if it teeters on predictability. A satisfying, if not perfect, journey into the supernatural.

Read this as an arc from Netgalley and unfortunately I had to dnf it, which is a shame because I loved hearing about Japan. But I couldn't take the constant jumping around from Jake's travels to conversations with ppl he met, then later on 2 characters were added and I realised I had no clue who they were or what they were there for. By that time I'd lost interest.

Unfortunately I think I should have dnfed this one.

Old Soul tells the story of Jake, a man who is desperately seeking answers for what happened to his childhood best friend after her suspicious death. He discovers similarities between his friend’s case and other deceased people from all over the world, all of whom have had strange encounters with a mysterious and seemingly ageless woman. But it’s also not really about that at all.

This book took me a long time to get through, despite being less than 300 pages long, and at times felt like a bit of a slog. We go back and forth between Jake’s travels, accounts from the people he’s meeting, and even the strange, ageless woman herself. I felt most compelled by the sections with the woman in the Badlands, and the journal entries from the Sculptor, but overall found the narrative difficult to follow. I understand that “the woman” had many different aliases, but trying to keep them all straight while also trying to keep track of a lot of a LOT of other characters and accounts was quite confusing. I found myself flipping back to previous sections to remind myself of who different characters were, or if a name had been mentioned before.

Aside from that, I felt the amount of information and different characters also kept me from connecting to any of them. Apart from the woman and the Sculptor, I didn’t feel particularly attached to anyone. I wanted less repetitive stories of how the woman was “killing” and more about her motivations, her life story, and her time with the Sculptor. I think the emotional payoff would have been much more satisfying if we saw more of the brief glimpses of humanity from the woman. By the end I was left wondering what her motivations were for surviving as long as she had, and why she never tried to find a successor or break free from the Tyrant.

And speaking of the Tyrant… there was nowhere near enough explanation as to what he was, why he existed, how often he chose his victims, and how he targeted them in the first place. At times I felt as though his inclusion and the way the characters talked about him was just a little goofy.

Overall, this was unfortunately not at all what I was expecting and left a lot to be desired.