Caitlin Starling - "Last to Leave the Room" - August Clarke

Caitlin Starling will discuss Last to Leave the Room. She will be joined in conversation by August Clarke. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

This event will be held in person at 57th Street Books.

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About the book: 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…

About the author: Caitlin Starling writes horror-tinged speculative fiction of all flavors. Her first novel, The Luminous Dead, won the LOHF Best Debut Award and was nominated for both the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards. She is also the author of the gothic horror tales Yellow Jessamine and The Death of Jane Lawrence, as well as a novella in the Vampire: The Masquerade audio collection, Walk Among Us. Her nonfiction has appeared in Nightmare and Uncanny. Starling 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.

About the interlocutor: August Clarke is here and queer, etc. They were a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Young Adult Fiction and a Andre Norton Nebula, Locus, Dragon, and Pushcart nominee. They have been published in PRISM international, Portland Review, and Eidolon. The Scratch Daughters is the second book in their indie-bestselling series, The Scapegracers, where they write as H. A. Clarke.