That said, while this may not bring anything new to the table, if you like your horror ambiguous and psychological, this is well worth checking out. The plot itself follows a very predictable trajectory, though there are some genuinely unsettling moments peppered throughout, and perhaps certain aspects would have felt fresher back when the book was first published.Ĭome Closer can be read as a genuine supernatural tale just as easily as it can be interpreted as a documentation of a woman’s descent into madness in the face of a life she doesn’t want. Though her narrative style is fast-paced and matter-of-fact, her blackouts, erratic behaviour, and frequent loss of control mean we can never be certain what to believe. With the story told in first-person, Amanda is a classic example of an unreliable narrator. Genre horror fans can help give a boost, especially with a World Fantasy or Stoker nomination.A woman with a seemingly perfect life starts to act out in increasingly strange and violent ways, eventually coming to fear she has been possessed by a demon. (Aug.)įorecast: As the blurbs from Stewart O'Nan and Darin Strauss suggest, this one is aimed, like Gran's sleeper of a first novel, at a mainstream literary audience. Gran demonstrates that an urbane and subtle approach to ideas more often treated with hysteria and flash can still produce a gripping contemporary tale of terror. This ambiguous balancing of the psychological and supernatural creates just the right amount of narrative tension to keep the reader turning pages to see if Amanda is a lost soul on the road to perdition or just a bored yuppie giving into the imp of the perverse. Is Amanda losing her grip? Or is Naamah, the dream woman, a demon who has sought since Amanda's infancy to take control of her? Gran keeps the reader as intriguingly uncertain as her heroine, letting Amanda relate her experience in the casual, un-self-conscious voice of someone so increasingly accepting of her outrageous behavior that she almost seems to stand outside it.

It’s only a story, we kept whispering to ourselves. The slow build up that starts with a scratching within apartment walls had us doubting every sound in our own dwelling. These episodes, as inexplicable as they are erratic, dovetail with sexually suggestive dreams dominated by an alluring woman who reminds Amanda of her imaginary childhood playmate. We found this psychological horror novel gripping and fascinating in that we could not look away. An industrious young architect with a promising career and seemingly happy marriage, Amanda begins acting uncharacteristically: writing obscene notes to her boss, shoplifting, committing impulsive acts of cruelty, indulging in extramarital affairs-and worse. 'What we think is impossible happens all the time,' observes Amanda, the narrator of Gran's second novel (after 2001's Saturn's Return to New York), providing all the explanation advanced for this effectively understated account of her demonic possession.

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