In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Susan Barker’s novel Old Soul is inventive and gripping literary horror.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“[A] sweeping work of literary horror. . . The slow-burning tension and lush, atmospheric prose build a creeping sense of dread that lingers long after the final page. Fans of both the deeply personal speculative horror of Carmen Maria Machado and the subtle, character-driven mystery of Haruki Murakami will be enthralled.”
In her own words, here is Susan Barker’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Old Soul:
Old Soul is a literary horror about a woman-of-many-aliases who moves across time and place and the terrifying things that happen to those who cross her path. It’s a historical novel, a love story and a metaphysical mystery, spiraling across decades and continents.
I compiled the playlist below during the 8 years of writing Old Soul, adding a new track every time I stumbled across something that fit with the themes, mood, atmosphere, characters or a certain scene of the book. There are also songs from the soundtracks of TV shows and films that were huge inspirations for Old Soul. I usually listened to this playlist in the morning when I was getting ready to write. It put me into the headspace necessary to re-enter the dark, paranormal world of the book.
Fratres – Arvo Pärt
‘The instant and eternity are struggling within us,’ Estonian composer Pärt says of Fratres – a struggle captured by the composition’s alternating stillness and franticness. There are many versions of Fratres – I like the haunting strings of the Kronos Quartet version best. It’s at the start of my playlist, a great overture for Old Soul, which is at heart about a woman who’s acutely aware of the fleetingness of human life in the grand, cosmic scheme of things, and is determined to stay in the world for as long as she can get away with.
Mura/Ballu Turturinu – Ernst Reijseger
This track’s from Reijseger’s album Requiem for a Dying Planet, originally composed for a Werner Herzog documentary The White Diamond (2004). The chanting at the opening of this song creeps the hell out of me. It makes me think of hooded cloaked men chanting before some arcane occult ritual – a human sacrifice perhaps. And then there’s this unsettling, sawing cello… It could soundtrack the woman and her latest victim, Rosa, as they hike into the stark, desolate Bisti Wilderness in the ‘Badlands’ sections of Old Soul. Hiking through blazing heat to their dreadful fates…
Candyman Suite: Floating Candyman – Phillip Glass
Candyman is a perfect horror film and Phillip Glass scored the perfect soundtrack. I love the glorious operatic vocals – so eerily beautiful and melodramatic – and then the choral section with the organ. I love the scene this composition soundtracks: Helen strapped to her bed in the psyche ward, Candyman and his bloody hook floating above her. She freaks out and the hospital orderlies rush to tranquilise her, but really there’s no escape: she’s enthralled to his dark, supernatural higher power. Just as the protagonist of Old Soul is to hers.
Human Fly – The Cramps
This scuzzy, punky, rockabilly-ish song is from a (flashback) scene in ‘Testimony One’. It’s the song that Jake and Lena are listening to when they’re stuck in a cage at the top of the mechanically broken-down Big Wheel in Southend-on-Sea (a seaside town in Essex, England). It’s a freezing day, the wind is blowing from the sea, and they’re both jumping about to The Cramps as they listen through one earbud in each from Jake’s discman, swigging from a bottle of Lambrini. It captures the joy and exuberance of their then-youth.
Dead Horse Alive with Flies – Harold Budd
This composition is stunning – a sinister, haunting and elegiac ode to decomposition and death. In Old Soul, the woman, as she nears the deadline for her human offering, is disintegrating – her immune system is breaking down, and bacteria poisoning her blood and putrefying her internal organs. It’s a very undignified situation to be in, but this is an exquisitely dignified song – (for me) capturing the transition from being to non-being, and the redistribution of our molecules throughout the universe.
Romanian Folk Dances, Sz 56: III – Bela Bartók
Where does the woman-of-many-aliases come from? How many tumultuous decades of European history has she lived through? I think of this composition as music from her unknown past, moving through Romania and Hungary in the earlier part of the twentieth century.
Da Smo Se Ranije Sreli – Branko Mataja
I love this hypnotic, dreamy guitar composition by Serbian-American blues folk musician Branko Mataja. It’s so enigmatic and strange and a touch psychedelic. It makes me think of the moment the woman enters her victims’ lives, in a smoky veil of mystery and otherworldly strangeness, and begins to manipulate and lure them under her spell.
It Follows Title – Disasterpeace
David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows was a huge inspiration for Old Soul. I love this 80’s synth / darkwave title track, which reminds me so much of John Carpenter horror movie soundtracks. The title track takes me back to the terrifying experience of first watching It Follows at the cinema in 2015. The dread! The exhilaration! The jump scares! It Follows truly blew me away and fired me up creatively. I owe this film a huge debt.
Far from Any Road – The Handsome Family
This is the theme to True Detective, Season One – another inspiration for Old Soul. Something about the vast rural landscapes, the Southern Gothic occult, and Rust Cohle’s anti-natalist pseudo-philosophy really resonated with me. Along with Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, True Detective S01 seeped into the ‘Badlands’ chapters of Old Soul, which are set in the high desert wastelands of New Mexico, and the series resonated in my creative unconscious as I developed the plot and themes of the Old Soul.
End of Nowhere – Slim Whitman
This song makes me think of Theo, the sculptor whose testimony comes at the end of Old Soul. Inspired by artists like Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keefe, Theo moves to remote, rural Taos County in the early 1980’s, determined spend her days in her sculptor’s studio, making Great Art. Instead she finds herself uninspired and achingly lonely in her rural isolation. But then she falls in love and her understanding of the world, and of herself, is irreversibly changed. This song fits that part of Theo’s story too.
Prospectors Arrive – Jonny Greenwood
This composition is gorgeous, swoony and magnificent. It’s full of pathos and mystery. I wish I could steal the entire There Will Be Blood soundtrack for my (fantasy) TV series of Old Soul. I’ve heard snatches of this particular track as I’ve been drifting off to sleep. It’s literally haunted my dreams.
I WILL BE WITH YOU ALWAYS – Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter
This song is melodramatic and unhinged in the best possible way. I love it. It makes me think of the woman’s Faustian pact with the dark entity that she serves. Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter’s occasionally-caterwauling singing is intense and histrionic (especially the ‘release meeee!’ parts) but resonates with emotional truth.
Susan Barker is the author of four books. Her third novel, The Incarnations, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Notable Book, a Kirkus Reviews’ Top Ten Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. An excerpt from Old Soul won a Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction in 2020, as well as funding from Arts Council England and The Society of Authors. Susan currently lives in Manchester, where she is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.