Book Breakdown: 'Tell Me I'm Worthless'

Breaking down every chapter of the outstanding trans horror novel 'Tell Me I'm Worthless'

Welcome to Queer History, where we investigate queer media throughout history, as well as conduct long-form interviews with queer people and allies.

Today, we’re breaking down the trans horror novel Tell Me I’m Worthless.

Prologue

A mysterious House is now gone, and a group of cheap flats are now in its place. A poor twelve-year-old boy and his parents move into the place—and the haunting begins. Is it a haunting of a house? Of a people? Of a society? All a spirit needs is a vessel. But even sensing the calamity awaiting them if they stay, the family can’t afford to live anywhere else.

The boy sees shapes in the wall, including a twisted figure bent into all the wrong angles. Keep this twisted figure in mind.

The boy’s father could be a MAGA. He hates seeing his son suffer not because his son is suffering, but because of what the suffering might mean. He doesn’t want a poof for a son.

Quote: At first, his mum comes into his room and hugs him until he goes back to sleep. After a while, she gives up. I mean, what’s the use. He does this most nights. His dad says maybe she coddles him too much, if she keeps hugging him until he stops crying then he’ll be a poof and he won’t have a fucking poof for a son.

Rumfitt, Alison. Tell Me I'm Worthless (p. 3). Tor Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Part 1: The Decline of Western Womanhood

POV Switch: Alice

Alice is a trans woman living in a decrepit flat. Like the boy in the prologue, her wallpaper gets damp with a twisted growing shape. She is haunted. The building is haunted. All a lingering spirit needs is a vessel and a target. But let’s be clear that being haunted vs seeing a ghost are two very different things.

A lot of people tell Alice that their workplaces are haunted. She listens to their stories so she doesn’t feel so alone. Something terrible happened to her in the past. A haunting she’s not yet ready to revisit.

She thinks of her once-close friend Ila. But Ila is now a TERF. They’re no longer close. They haven’t spoken in a while. And she has another friend who disappeared: Hannah. Something happened to the three of them when they went into a haunted house. Or rather, the House. But again, Alice is not ready to remember what happened.

Despite mostly being a shut-in these days, Alice accepts an invitation to a party. It’s a worthy distraction, especially meeting up with their other trans friends. They exchange bags of drugs that will serve as the cover charge to get into the party.

Alice walks the line between passing for safety’s sake vs being distant—until she brings home a girl for sex. Strange things happen. Does the bed move on its own? Does a hand reach out from underneath the bed and grab the girl? Or is it just Alice imagining things?

Then we’re left to wonder whether Alice is haunted. Whether her flat is haunted. Or whether Alice is just kind of crazy. Something bad happened to her, but she’s not ready to remember what happened. All she has is a scar across her forehead that she remembers her ex-friend Ila carved into her skin.

Then she gets a message from Ila. The House isn’t yet done with them. Alice wants to forget, but the past is haunting her as much as the future.

Quote: It feels like an anecdote that was meant to describe something, a metaphor about late capitalism, hauntology, about how work turns us all into ghosts, repeating the same learned actions over and over again for eternity. For that person, the wonder and the possibility and the horror of a haunting was just, in the end, somebody else doing their job for them.

Rumfitt, Alison. Tell Me I'm Worthless (p. 12). Tor Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Quote: I have to know that there are people who would understand if I talked to them. I have to know. I have to believe that my trauma is relatable, if controversial, that there are people who would listen to me and go, it’s okay Alice, it’s completely okay. You are so fucking normal. Everything you’ve experienced is normal. But soberly I think that, really, the only person out there who could ever understand is Ila, and I can’t talk to her. I just can’t. We used to be so close, but I can barely think about her now without having an anxiety attack. It’s probably the same with her.

Rumfitt, Alison. Tell Me I'm Worthless (p. 13). Tor Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

POV Switch: Ila

Ila has a Jewish mother and Pakistani father. She is a cis woman of color until [redacted] happens, but more on that later. For now, she is a TERF who attends TERF activism meetings. She attends a meeting at the Black and Minority Ethnic Community Center. She wonders if she is included in the group as a token to prove they aren’t racist. They discuss bathroom rights and whether it’s safe to let trans women into the women’s bathroom.

Even though she’s a TERF, we have to wonder if her allies still contain Alice, the girl who hurt her when they were in the House. The girl who tells the story in the explicit reverse, saying it was Ila who hurt Alice. Ila remembers it the other way around. Even though Alice has a scar across her forehead she says Ila put there, Ila also has a scar across her abdomen that she says Alice carved into her. Ila says Alice raped her; Alice says Ila raped her. Who is right? And the biggest horror—could they both have hurt each other but not remember it?

After the meeting, the group of TERFs gather at a bar. When Ila goes to the bathroom, a woman named Joyce follows her and attempts to force her into sex. When Ila resists, the woman says sorry, please don’t tell anyone what happened. Admitting what happened between them would just ruin the entire group.

Quote: “What I think,” says the woman with black hair. She’d said her name was … Joyce? That sounded right. “Is that the erasure of the term, ‘woman’, is a dangerous precedent. Once you erase something, its existence as a unique category ceases to exist, and that’s why I’m here, really.”

Rumfitt, Alison. Tell Me I'm Worthless (p. 46). Tor Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

POV Switch: House

The House is a living, breathing, haunting thing. It watches people on the outside. Some die gruesome deaths. Any cat that enters the house is unlikely to exit. It is a trade of a life for a haunting. The House sits, waiting for Alice and Ila to return.

Quote: For one live organism to continue to exist, another live organism must stop existing all together.

Rumfitt, Alison. Tell Me I'm Worthless (p. 61). Tor Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

POV Switch: Alice

Alice doesn’t really work, but sometimes she turns on her webcam so people can pay to watch her do normal stuff, like cleaning her apartment. Other times, she sends them customized videos for a fair price. What she often sends are sissy hypnotic chants, the kind intended to (by request) brainwash cisgender men into believing they are trans women. Or at least that they want to be some kind of woman.

Quote: Gender is as much about the air around you, the kind of place you are in, as how you look and how you act. And how you feel inside barely means anything at all, in the grand scheme of things.

Rumfitt, Alison. Tell Me I'm Worthless (p. 65). Tor Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Quote: All of sissy porn, she wrote, is about trying to produce a particular kind of feminine ideal, one with huge breasts and a petite waist and big, anime eyes surrounded by long lashes. So much of it is about trying to convince the people consuming it – men – that if they want to be ‘fucked by cock’ then that means they’re a woman, because a woman is only defined by her relationship to ‘taking cock’ in the mouth or vagina or rectum. That at the end of it all, the only thing a woman is, is a hole.

Rumfitt, Alison. Tell Me I'm Worthless (p. 83). Tor Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Alice has nightmares about going to work as often as completing suicide. Each time, she wakes back to the suspicion that she is possessed or being haunted. Whatever happened in the House three years ago won’t leave her alone. She wonders if airing out and cleaning her flat is a safe way to air out and cleanse the place of the spirit haunting her. She hopes that she can cleanse the place of Hannah’s spirit, the girl they left in the House three years ago.

Quote: Has the man in the poster ever tried to fuck me? If he could see me then there would have at least been an attempt. But … it’s like the end of Jane Eyre. Mr Rochester is blinded in the house fire, which means he no longer has power over Jane. The eyes are, in Freud, akin to the testicles, and him losing the eyes means he is castrated of masculinity. Jane looks after him. This eyeless ghost cannot and will not try to exert dominance over me.

Rumfitt, Alison. Tell Me I'm Worthless (pp. 78-79). Tor Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Quote: Bigotry can sit inside of you, hardening, turning into something painful before you even realise it is there. If you attend the meeting of a fascist political group, for example, you were not made fascist by that group, you were already a fascist, but one who did not have an outlet. Radicalisation is a complicated thing. I think often what it actually does is simply nurture an idea that was already there, inside of you.

Rumfitt, Alison. Tell Me I'm Worthless (p. 81). Tor Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

POV Change: Ila

According to Ila’s memory, when they went into the House three years ago, Alice raped her. And that memory gets blurred with her remembering what Joyce did to her in the bathroom, attempting to violate Ila. Both of her attackers deny what happened, but we only know whether one of them really happened. We have not yet been back in time to see what happened between Ila, Alice, and Hannah in the House. But soon? Perhaps. Because wherever she goes, the House calls to Ila.

Ila returns to her parents’ home, where they’ve redone several rooms into new designs now that Ila doesn’t live there anymore. The redone rooms include her old bedroom, as well as the bathroom where she once attempted suicide by cutting.

Ila would like to one day date someone, but she feels completely dissociated whenever she tries to get intimate. And despite her active role in TERF groups, she mostly gets matched with trans activists. Almost as though she’s running from a truth that connects her more deeply to trans people than she’s willing to admit.

As if to prove her point, when Ila returns home, she masturbates while watching a sissy hypno chant video. What is Ila attempting to convince herself is true?

POV Change: House

The House calls itself Albion, named after the nearby town, which is a collection of houses, fishing huts, and an inn.

Its first builder was a married man named William. When he gets arrested for buggery and starved to death, his widow hears the House call to her. She goes to it, enters into its deepest rooms, and then later is found having hung herself. The House promised to return her husband to her, but instead has sent her to meet him in Death.

POV Change: Alice

Alice goes to the beach and remembers going to the beach years ago after Pride. With Hannah supposedly sleeping and snoring next to them, Ila and Alice had sex on the beach.

With the memories hanging over her, Alice drops one photo after another of her, Ila, and Hannah into a fire. Gone, burned, desecrated.

Then Alice goes to a friend’s house, where it turns out a small gathering has turned into a big gathering. A party. When it’s clear she’s freaking out at the number of people, her friend Sasha takes her upstairs to “the chillout room,” which is kept light, soft, and quiet for people who need low stimulation.

Alice thinks about the text she got from Ila. Can she really see her again? After everything?

And then while in the chillout room, she’s certain she saw Ila at the doorway, watching her, but then she’s suddenly gone as fast as she arrived.

She finds Sasha passed out in Jon’s room, with Jon cutting fresh words into her skin. The act reminds Alice of Ila cutting into her forehead years ago at the House. As much as she wants to be free of Ila and the House, she won’t be until she agrees to see them both again.

POV Change: Ila

Ila sits in her bed, smoking and feeling like a boy as she browses the internet. She reads stories about people who were married to someone who came out as trans. She remembers them wearing a strap-on the last time she had sex with a girl. The sex was so good that she felt at one with the strap-on, as though her nerve endings attached and made the strap-on into a real penis.

She doesn’t just feel like a boy. Sometimes, she presents as one, even if it’s just in the bedroom.

But then the girl pushes Ila off, saying she called her a “tranny.”

In the aftermath, she posts on Mumsnet, pretending to be a mother with a daughter who wants to be a boy. If Ila isn’t full of a yearning to be trans—which would mean she already is—then I’ll eat five copies of this book.

Ila remembers what happened at the House. She remembers Alice raping her—but for a moment, it’s her attacking Alice. She can’t be completely sure which one is true.

Later, she sees that Joyce—the woman who assaulted Ila in the bathroom, then begged Ila not to tell anyone—has released a fake story accusing Ila of being the one who assaulted Joyce. And then the girl who says Ila called her a tranny is there, backing up suspicions that Ila is an assaulting monster.

She hopes that by next week, everyone forgets.

But then worse than the accusations is the voice of the House, calling to Ila to rejoin with Alice and return to the House. To finally look upon what actually happened and face it.

Ila relents and texts Alice, asking to meet. They agree to meet at Queen park, near the dead end tree. The tree gets its name from looking dead but being alive, as well as from people who slept beneath its branches and died, or people who hung themselves from the branches and are now just as dead.

They argue over whether to back to the House, but eventually both agree returning is the only way they’ll ever be free of it for good.

Quote: In the mirror Ila can see that she is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her traumas sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.

Rumfitt, Alison. Tell Me I'm Worthless (p. 128). Tor Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Quote: Today, Alice displays the cunt scar cut into her forehead proudly, for the first time ever. She rubs at it lightly, feeling like the Harry Potter of transphobic hate crime victims.

Rumfitt, Alison. Tell Me I'm Worthless (p. 135). Tor Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Part 2: Irreversible Damage

POV Change: House

The House tells the story of how it was built into its finest architecture. A man named Edmund married a girl named Emily. He went to work revitalizing the House. One day, he began to disappear into a Red Room, where he would take women of color and trans women who never came back out.

His wife Emily worries at what could possibly be happening in the red room of Albion. Edmund laughs and tells her there is nothing to worry about, he is delighted to show her what’s in the room. More so, delighted to do to her what he has done to the other people. It is the last thing Emily ever sees alive.

Quote: Edmund’s name grew in stature as he started to invite guests to the house, often with very little notice, which could be taxing for both the staff and for Emily. He cultivated friendships, as best he could, using his father’s name well, with politicians and scientists, criminologists, psychologists. After a year or two, he began to read, voraciously, writings about race and racial difference, about sex. About, more than anything else, eugenics. This started as a simple academic interest, but Emily watched, with helpless curiosity, as it grew and grew in intensity.

Rumfitt, Alison. Tell Me I'm Worthless (p. 150). Tor Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

POV Change: Hannah

Over three years ago, Hannah was still alive, not yet in the house, and met a boy named Brandon. Their Tinder date turned into a relationship. Unfortunately, Alice inexplicably doesn’t like Brandon. Just gets a bad feeling.

Later at the beach, we learn that while Ila had sex with Alice on the beach, they assumed Hannah was asleep, but she was actually awake and knew what was happening.

Now we turn to the debate between the three over whether to go to the House. This is the meeting that destroyed their lives. They agree to go to the House, knowing it is probably haunted but relishing in that fact. And so they go at the end of summer, planning just to spend a little time there, then leave.

Of course that’s not what happens.

The House does what it needs in order to separate Hannah from the girls. It leads her into Edmund’s red room, where it now does to her what it did to all of the people Edmund brought there. It eats Hannah alive.

Quote: There’s a difference between a ghost story and a haunted house story. This feels so basic, but also so hard to articulate. A ghost story is about the thing that it tells you it is about: a ghost, an ephemeral thing from beyond the grave, trying to contact the living. A haunted house story is about more than that. It is about structure, architecture, and history.

Rumfitt, Alison. Tell Me I'm Worthless (p. 168). Tor Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

POV Change: Alice And/Or Ila

Alice and Ila find the red room and Hannah, and now the real horror begins. It twists Hannah into pretzel shapes that no one can survive. Finally, it shapes her into a swastika.

And truest of horrors, the House splits reality in two. In one reality, Alice rapes Ila. In the other reality, Ila rapes Alice. Both leave certain that they are the victim, but also not being able to remember/not being able to forget the second reality where their positions were reversed.

Quote: Both Ila and Alice sobbed. The light blazed down, illuminating Hannah’s shattered body. Ila’s gut twisted inside her at the sight of the thing. Alice let her go, after holding her painfully hard during the mutilation, and now, free of her grasp, she stumbled a little away from Alice to throw up onto the wooden floor.

Rumfitt, Alison. Tell Me I'm Worthless (pp. 190-191). Tor Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Quote: She cried, harder and deeper than she ever had. Alice tried to kick open the door, but it wouldn’t move, however hard she kicked. It felt like there was nothing on the other side of the door – that it wasn’t a door at all, but the border to the world, and the inside of this room was the entire world. If you were to open the door you would find … what?

Rumfitt, Alison. Tell Me I'm Worthless (p. 191). Tor Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Quiote: The House swallowed her, and inside it she found that she wasn’t alone. There were hundreds of girls buried within. Girls without eyes, girls without heads, girls without wombs. Giant holes cut into their bodies to pull things out, unravelled and pleading for help that would never come. Martyred girls, mutilated girls, girls that Hannah thought, in her darkest moments, deserved what they had gotten. They all huddled close to one another for warmth.

Rumfitt, Alison. Tell Me I'm Worthless (p. 198). Tor Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Part 3: The Dance Of Albion

POV Change: House

The House seems pleased that Hannah disappeared. The police suspected her boyfriend Brandon, but they never charged him. The police questioned Hannah’s closest friends, which means they didn’t question Alice and Ila.

POV Change: Ila

Back in the present, Ila and Alice have sex. It isn’t good, but it’s a way for them to reconnect before diving back into the horrors.

Alice confronts Ila about being a TERF. The rage inspires a hate-fuck the likes of which they’ve never seen. This time, it is good sex, but it is filled with shame. Alice begs Ila to call her a tranny. The words work them both into a fierce lust.

In the aftermath, Ila thinks about her shame from being seen in public with Alice. She’s afraid it makes people think she is trans. Well, if you protest too much, it might be true.

POV Change: Alice

Alice remembers learning about trans people on Tumblr. She experiences a moment of deep empathy for where she’s coming from, and for where Ila is coming from too. And with that feeling comes honesty about how she feels about the House. She misses it. She wants to go back. With Ila by her side, she will go back. It has been decided.

The House has decayed well beyond when they last saw it. Even the front door is gone, leaving a gaping maw in the house. They enter the House, manage to stay together, and then end up in the Red Room, where they confront the evil that called them back.

Ila admits that she brought Alice here for a reason. The House promised that if she brought Alice back, it would let Ila go. The confession doesn’t deter Alice. She says that it doesn’t matter now because now that they’re here, the House won’t let them go until this is finished. One way or another, they’re in this together.

POV Change: House

The House spreads its haunting beyond the boundaries of the shell that looks like a house.

POV Change: Ila and Alice

Now in the red room, Ila and Alice see Hannah emerge from the wall, a twisted figure as impossibly shaped as when they last saw her. The two discover the split in reality that occurred three years ago. The two discover that they’re both telling the truth, even if those truths are in complete conflict with each other. They discover Hannah is still there, twisted like a pretzel, somehow alive yet not alive.

And then the door in the far part of the room, the door that has always been shut and locked, begins to open.

POV Change: You

The House tells an alternate history in which Alice never transitioned.  In the alternate reality, they remained Jacob. They married Hannah and all seemed well until she discovered Jacob wearing her clothes and makeup. Then she worries people will know what thing she has married. She calls the police—my husband is a gay fag—and in response, Jacob bashes her brains in with a hammer. Then he hangs himself. Their kids grow up orphans.

The boundaries between dream, nightmare, and reality continue to blur. The red room sends them visions of their horrible fates and horrible deaths.

POV Change: Alice and Ila

Having confronted the darkness in themselves and the House, Alice and Ila escape to the outside.

They set the House on fire. It reaches such a blaze that by the time the fire brigade arrives, it is too late to save the House.

Epilogue: Glad Day

Remember the boy from the Prologue? That young boy grows up in the new set of flats built where the House used to be. The boy learns how to make explosives. He takes one to the next Pride parade.

At the Pride parade, we rejoin with Alice and Harry. Harry is Ila—or Ila was Harry. That was their deadname. Now they have accepted that they are a trans man and have transitioned, taking hormones and taking a new name.

The House may be gone, but the malevolence of the House remains. It urges the boy to place his bomb where it needs to be. The House urges him to make it explode. The boy sets off the bomb.

The explosion catches Harry and Alice, taking with it Harry’s ability to hear. Quite an explosion.

Quote: He goes to her, on his hands and knees, rubble and blood and bodies all around them. The police, the ambulance, the news crews. They are coming. Photographers are taking pictures of them, and they will put these pictures on the front pages of newspapers, and the picture will be with them forever, they won’t ever escape it, two trans people covered in blood and embracing amidst the carnage. The photographer who gets the image wins a prize for it. They don’t know that yet. They only know this: Harry crawls towards Alice with the last of his strength, his arms outstretched and reaching. The rain will come. When it does it will be bloody. The future will be red-tinted and unknowable, but they will be together. Come to me now, mouths Alice. Hold me.

Rumfitt, Alison. Tell Me I'm Worthless (p. 260). Tor Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.