A not-quite-vampire villain whom you can’t quite hate

The quest for immortality is probably as old as humanity’s development of self-consciousness, and so it’s no surprise that art continues to engage in one way or another with the long-lived and the undead. The vampire genre seems to never go out of style.

While such stories’ tropes can be useful, of course, they can also overwhelm a narrative and turn it bland, as in my recently disappointing experience with the newest iteration of “Nosferatu,” which took its silent film source material — which manages to convey the sad, pathetic, deeply lonely nature of its bloodthirsty villain — and added absolutely nothing of interest, instead relying only on high cheekbones, menacing music, a silly accent and a woman who (gasp!) enjoys sex sometimes.

It was with special pleasure, then, that on the heels of that film I read “Old Soul” by Susan Barker. The novel isn’t about a vampire, exactly, but it does center on one woman’s quest for immortality and the lives she takes in order to keep her own. It’s as much about her victims and the ripples of loss they leave behind in the form of grief-stricken friends and family. Jake is one of these, and alternating chapters take the form of testimonies he is collecting as he attempts to solve the mystery of who this woman is and what she’s been doing and why.

After a brief prologue set in 1982 (which becomes meaningful later in the book), the first chapter, “Testimony 1—Mariko,” opens with Jake, the narrator, meeting Mariko by chance when they’re both late for a flight leaving Osaka. They bump into each other again later, both staying near the airport to take the next flight out in the morning, and Mariko invites Jake to share a meal with her. A very controlled, buttoned-up sort of person, Mariko knows she’s often seen as cold, and yet something about Jake, or maybe the circumstances (missing a flight isn’t the sort of thing that happens to her) allows her to loosen up and she has a drink for the first time in years. And then another, and another.

When Jake helps her to her hotel room, Mariko, drunk and confessional, begins to tell him about her twin brother, Hiroji, who died in 2011. Although they stopped speaking as teenagers, their psychic bond remained, and in the weeks leading up to his death, she began to have nightmares about running in a bamboo forest, something evil chasing her. She knew that something bad was happening to Hiroji.

And, indeed, he called her the night before he died, told her he’d “entered the mind of a higher-dimensional god” and warned her not to open the door for anyone that night. The next morning, he was dead. Jake is shaken by Mariko’s confession and asks whether Hiroji’s autopsy revealed anything odd. “Were his internal organs the wrong way around? Reversed?” Mariko confirms this, stunned and disturbed. This is how Jake discovers that the death of his best friend growing up, Lena, was not a unique, isolated mystery. Here was another person who lost someone who not only seemed to go mad before death but who also experienced this weird physical distortion.

So begins Jake’s not-so-wild goose chase, trying to track down other people whose loved ones were left reversed after their deaths, finding clues in each person’s story that lead him to find the next. What he learns in these fascinating testimonies — each introducing a whole cast of characters and circumstances and reading in some ways like self-contained short stories — is that each of the people who were reversed when they died met a woman in the weeks beforehand, although she never seemed to give the same name twice. She was always a stranger to the area, usually a foreigner, who was charismatic and appealing and who took a deep, personal interest in them and shared intimacies — emotional or sexual, sometimes both — with them. And every time, after their encounters with her were over, these people changed in ways neither they nor those around them could understand. The details are best left for the reader to discover and relish, as they are wonderfully unsettling yet somehow delicious as well.

The chapters that alternate with the testimonies are titled “Badlands” and follow that strange woman — it’s clear early on that it’s her — as she drives Rosa, a 17-year-old would-be spiritual influencer, to the Bisti Badlands in New Mexico with the promise of helping her shoot a video and some photographs in the eerie landscape. On the way, the woman turns on the charm, despite her growing physical discomfort, which includes E. coli in her urinary tract, hair loss and a burning scalp, and “teeth loosening as bacteria work under the gums — microbial time bombs ticking deep in periodontal sockets.”

Barker ups the tension one bit at a time, unspooling the horrors slowly while maintaining a firm grasp on the emotional stakes within each victim’s narrative. While the novel ultimately questions how free the woman really is, all its other characters are also confined in myriad ways. Perhaps that is the human condition, regardless of how long a person lives. And although the many-named woman is, in a way, the villain of the piece, it’s hard not to like her; she’s a compelling character who has, as she puts it, made living into an art form — how she does it is refreshingly specific, strange and original. “Old Soul” is a thoroughly pleasurable read.

Ilana Masad, a books and culture critic, is the author of the novel “All My Mother’s Lovers” and the forthcoming “Beings.”