But most of us don’t, and I didn’t either.” As is stated by Amanda “We could devote our lives to making sense of the odd, the inexplicable, the coincidental. From here, we slowly see the disintegration of Amanda, her personal and professional spiralling out of her control. She is happily married to Ed, living in a loft apartment, where it all begins with the sinister tapping that never seems to stop, which we are later to learn is the first sign of demonic possession. She is an ambitious architect working on her biggest project to date, the Fitzgerald House, which she is hoping will lead to her moving on from her current employers, Fields and Carmine, to set up in business on her own. Sarah Gran's novella is a haunting horror thriller, interspersed with the darkest of humour, chillingly ambiguous about the central character, the suitably unreliable Amanda.

instead of emezi's transcendent/poetic/mythological realm, Come Closer shows, through a tantalizingly slow psychological slippage, how easy it is to give in, to let it all go, how freeing, sometimes, to let the demon tear down the whole damn house of cards. this is just as effective, but gran spins her similar situation in a different direction.

It’s a truly chilling little story of a character’s descent into madness, her blackouts leaving the reader to fill in some of the pieces themselves, but showing enough of the gruesome aftermath to know that whatever she did, it ain’t gonna win her any good citizen awards.Ī few months back, i read Freshwater, which is (in part) about possession manifesting as mental disorder/insanity, and i thought emezi did a fantastic job of writing that headspace-making it accessible and sympathetic to the reader. It’s a story of a woman’s disintegration as she is invaded by a demonic presence that insinuates itself into her body and mind, slowly and irrevocably supplanting her free will, causing her to engage in increasingly self-destructive behaviors, blowing up her life as it sinks its claws ever-deeper into her mind jeopardizing her marriage, her job, her reputation, and her list of “never have i evers,” leading her helplessly down a violent path…as much as she can recall of it. This is short and anything but sweet, somehow managing to pack a whole lot of creepiness into just under 200 pages.

HEY, QUARANTINERS! i wrote another readalong/booklist thing for f(r)iction! this book is on it: The Call Is Coming From Inside You

Come Closer by Sara Gran