this was a dnf for me unfortunately :/ i just dont think this story was my cup of tea. there was a disconnect between myself and the narrative and i couldn't move past it.

I am giving this one four stars. I didn’t get to it in time to give a full review and I apologize for that

4⭐️

<b>The woman with the sinking basement, the woman with a door she can’t remember and can’t open.</b>

Tamsin works for Myrica Dynamics conducting research, and they’ve discovered that the city is progressively sinking, which could cause catastrophic damage to the city’s infrastructure. Tamsin has begun to notice the sinking and stretching within her own basement and becomes consumed with studying it. A strange door that was not previously there appears, but cannot be opened by Tamsin. Tamsin’s curiosity is all consuming and she sets up cameras and keeps an eye on the door at all times until one night, the door finally opens and a woman resembling Tamsin steps through.

This was more science fiction horror than I’ve read before, and I really enjoyed it. This book makes you feel like you’re going a little crazy along with Tamsin. Each character was complex and interesting to read. The scientific parts of it were difficult to fully grasp - like the reason for Tamsin’s basement stretching and a new door emerging, but it’s still enjoyable even without daily understanding that aspect of it.

<b>The siren call of the subsidence, the distortion of her home and the accompanying distortion of her mind.</b>

Listen to me. LISTEN TO ME!!! I really didn't know how to feel about this one at first. I picked it up initially a while ago and flew through the first 30% but put the book down for quite a while because I felt like nothing was happening yet. I picked it up again on audio and stayed up until 3am to finish it lmaooo. The action basically started right after the mark of when I set it down.

This book is about a ruthless scientist, Dr. Tamsin Rivers, the experiment she's doing, and how the city she lives in starts sinking. Along with that, the basement in her house starts sinking and a door appears. Out of that door stumbles Dr. River's doppelganger.

The second half of this book was SO good. The horror had such a creeping sensation and I love an unreliable narrator. Not knowing how things will progress and then seeing the MC lose her reality was done so well. I would jump back a paragraph or page sometimes to make sure I hadn't missed something while Dr. Rivers descended into confusion and fear. I loved the self-reflection and the explanation of doppelganger mythos.

I think I would have enjoyed a little more or less of the other scientific elements in this book. The plot left them to hang for a while and they felt really unnecessary until they suddenly didn't. AND I would have liked more explanation on what we find out about how everything starts. Did Dr. Rivers just forget everything like she slowly forgets herself?

I did like the note of hope at the end that also read like it could have been Dr. Rivers entertaining returning to her previous self.

This reminded me in ways of The Haunting of Hill House so I would maybe recommend to people that enjoy that kind of horror!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my ARC!

I will literally read anything that Caitlin Starling puts out so, even though this was my normal genre of choice, I gave it a shot. This novel was a bit confusing at times and just when you think you have it figured out, everything switches. It probably won’t be as widely well received as some of her other works, but it will be well loved by the right audience. If you love art house horror or psychological thrillers then you’ll enjoy this - especially if you don’t mind being a bit confused at times. I enjoy books where I don’t always have all the details because it creates an atmosphere similar to what the character is going through & makes the book feel more immersive. Starling is a master of suspense & odd stories and she absolutely knocked it out of the park with this one.

I will, unfortunately, be abstaining from sharing my thoughts about this title until St. Martin's Press adequately addresses the current boycott and its claims and questions.

Actual Rating 4.5

I honestly wasn’t expecting to enjoy this sci-fi as much as I did, but what a ride. The author did an excellent job with the characters. They had unique personalities, goals, and motivations, and this brought them all to life in a meaningful way. I enjoyed how my perspective/feelings about the main characters changed throughout the book as I got to know more about their motivations and past. There was also a secondary character that I hope gets her own book – she was wonderful.

There’s a lot going on in this one while at the same time feeling like not much is happening, especially in the first portion. It makes for an odd reading experience. I think the first quarter of the book was a bit slow, but there was a lot of setup necessary for the rest of the book. The horror is also quite slow in its buildup, and I’d almost call this more of a psychological thriller than horror.

I highly recommend this read, though I know it won’t be for everyone. If you pick it up, push through the first 25% - I promise it’s worth the wait.

Tried revisiting this one after my original DNF of it and still couldn't get into it. The writing was just too clunky for me, and what started as a really cool concept ended up not making for a very riveting book. Thank you to the publisher for letting me give this one a shot!

DNF @ 20 pages

This might be very early to DNF a book by an author who's written a book I've given 5 stars to (The Luminous Dead), but this book starts so slow and I felt like it took forever for me to even read these 20 pages. And since I didn't enjoy this author's previous book (The Death of Jane Lawrence), I don't want to force myself to slog through a book I'm unfortunately not enjoying.

When you read a Caitlin Starling book, you're guaranteed to read something you've never read before. Her work is so unique and unpredictable! This might be her most unusual yet.

The first quarter of the book is an explanation of what the main character, a scientist, is doing. I didn't get it. It went over my head. The important thing to know is that the experiments or research the main character is in charge of conducting are causing the entire city to begin sinking, which will cause pipes to burst and buildings to collapse if something isn't done to stabilize the situation. What bothered me is that for the rest of the book, I couldn't remember what the science part was in the beginning that caused all this to happen, and it's never mentioned again because the focus is all on the sinking city. It just started to bother me that a full quarter of the book was devoted to this complicated science thing and by the end of the book I can't even remember what that was.

This is not a long book but it feels like the bulk of the story is carried in the last 20% of the thing. It could have been a novella. Like, all that science stuff in the beginning was just a waste of time cause I didn't understand it and once I was past it, I couldn't remember anything. lol If you're reading the book and struggling with it, cause I do feel it's a slow-burner, just hang in there cause the last chunk is the real meat and the most interesting stuff. And there's always a dash of sapphic romance in the author's books, so that was a sweet piece of payoff, too.

I loved it but I don't know if I'd read it again. The first quarter was just a bitter pill to swallow and there is a lot of science talk throughout that I didn't always care about. But the characters and the weird things happening between them carry the story and it really is unlike anything I've seen before. What I really, really want when I read is a new, unique, original experience, and this book delivered it.

I really wanted to enjoy this, but it just didn't grab me. I enjoy books who focus on character and story, and I felt like there were a lot of passages in this book that didn't drive the plot forward, and alienated me as a reader.

What would you do if you discovered a doppelgänger of yourself?

Dr. Tamsin Rivers experiences just this when a mysterious door that didn’t exist before appears in her basement lab. But the longer her replica stays, the more detached Tamsin starts to feel from her reality.

This speculative sci-fi horror was incredibly mysterious and intriguing. In it we have a research team whose experiments are somehow causing their town to sink. We have rooms that are gradually changing their dimensions. We also have a mysterious door and doppelgängers.

Unfortunately what we don’t have is answers. I love when a book can be strange and mysterious but it’s incredibly unsatisfying to be left with so many unanswered questions!

Overall the writing was good, if not a bit slowly paced, and I would say I mostly enjoyed my time with the story.

Sometimes I feel like Caitlin Starling is writing books for me personally? So, thanks Caitlin!

The building dread was absolutely perfect and like with Jane Lawrence, you're often wondering what the hell is happening and what is even real and what a ride it is. I loved it.

Is quirky the right word? This one was an interesting ride. I never really knew what to expect with this one. Solid read

DNF at 35%. While I was very intrigued by the concept and elements introduced, what I read was highly disappointing. The first 20% is filled with scientific babble about an unknown experiment that makes zero sense from context and clues. The MC Tamsin’s experiment seems like it could be something interesting but were given absolutely no information on it and the actual “what” of it is completely glossed over. We also know that the city is sinking, “possibly” because of her experiment, but like I said we still don’t know what that is or the connection. It’s just not enough information given to stay invested. Then we’re introduced to Tamsin’s doppelgänger. I was hoping for a little more creep factor right off the bat but the experiments are tedious and somewhat boring. So far, I definitely wouldn’t categorize this book as the horror I was expecting. I also tried this as an audiobook and the narrator is extremely monotone and does not differentiate voices much at all. Everything she says sounds sarcastic. All in all, there’s very little to keep me going on this one and I will not be finishing.

Thank you to St. Martins Press, Caitlin Starling, and NetGalley for the advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

An amazing book by an amazing author - not my first read from Caitlin Starling, having loved all three of the others I've read by her. Full of science, vibes, mystery and emotion. Highly, highly recommend this & any other book Starling has written!

All I needed to know about this book was that there was a mysterious door, which is always fun, and a doppelgänger (I just love that word), and I had to read it.

Last to Leave the Room by Caitlin Starling is a captivating combination of sci-fi thriller and psychological horror…once the double shows up. Seriously, the first 20% is a struggle. The letters, DNF, were constantly scrolling through my brain. In the author's acknowledgements, she mentions the word, technobabble, which is exactly what it is. A continuous onslaught of pseudoscientific meandering. However, with the arrival of the double, the tone and pace of the book start to shift, and you begin to understand why it was written that way. A lot of it was essential to understanding the main character and just how much of an impact the double's existence made on her psyche and her life. Maybe, it could have been a bit shorter though.

The best stories about doppelgängers add extra meaning to the phrase, to lose oneself, and I think this book does that extremely well. The MC’s transformation is just as enjoyable as it is terrifying. She is not a good person, but you can’t help but dread what’s going to become of all this. I also really enjoyed the clever way the author elicits thoughts on human nature, identity, obsession, and how far people will go to pursue and hoard knowledge.

I definitely recommend this book, especially if you like stories about doppelgangers, just try not to get too hung up on the science-y bits. Cause I’m thinking, maybe the whole point is sometimes, we’re just better off not knowing.

Thank you St. Martin’s Press for the opportunity to read and review this book.

This was so thoroughly not what I was expecting it to be. We’re introduced right off the bat to Tamsin, who’s just the most irritating girlboss, treats all her coworkers like crap, and also is working to conceal from the public the fact that the city is sinking and no one knows why but it might be related to her research. As I said. Girlboss. But then an apparent clone of her shows up from the door that has mysteriously appeared in her basement and things get REALLY WEIRD. A lot of the book (maybe more than necessary) is spent watching Tamsin’s classic descent into madness. Which she also works to conceal from everyone around her, including her handler, Lachlan. I have to say, Tamsin’s relationship with Lachlan (and Lachlan as a character) was actually the highlight of the book for me, and I really wish there had been more of it. It became shockingly sweet and gentle, and also I really want a tall hot lady with a prosthetic arm to come busting into a basement to rescue me.
Anyway, the one problem with this book is the one I always seem to have with horror novels: the ending fell apart a bit. The climactic scene in particular was really hard to follow, and I had to reread it to try to figure out what on earth (or not earth) had happened. Also, because the revelation was sort of crammed into the end, it didn’t really feel like all the various phenomena that occurred over the course of the book were really clearly linked together. In fact, the more that I think about it now, the more it seems like there were quite a lot of loose ends that didn’t get tied up. But I’m going to be a bit of a pain in the butt here and say that honestly, I still really enjoyed reading it and would absolutely recommend it with the caveat that I wouldn’t do so to people who want their horror/sci-fi to have strong, well-woven world-building.

DNF @ 16%

This book is such a slog to get through. The character is not compelling and the writing isn't holding my attention. The mystery is interesting, but we're doing the same thing over and over and over again, and I'm not willing to sit through another 300 pages to find out what it is.

Slow paced, creepy scifi. Dr. Tamsin Rivers, a scientist, is in the final stages of her breakthrough communications project. Then she notices that the city in which she resides is slowly sinking... and her own basement is sinking much faster. Is this related to her project? Even stranger, a door has appeared in her basement, a door which doesn't lead anywhere and is impossible to open. This defies the laws of physics, and she's quickly obsessed with the phenomenon. When an exact doppelganger of herself somehow comes through the door, Tamsin is even further engaged. But her obsession with these strange occurrences begins to affect her wellbeing. Will she find the truth, or will she lose herself along the way?

This was inexorably creepy. The horror elements build up so slowly. I was constantly awaiting the next revelation. Tamsin is initially quite unlikable. She's highly intelligent, but ruthless and obsessed with her work, no matter the consequences to others. You definitely feel for her as the story progresses though, as you watch her life slowly deteriorate. By the midpoint, I was hooked. It's a strange and unexpectedly engaging story. Would recommend.

I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.