Julie and James settle into a house in a small town outside the city where they met. The move-prompted by James's penchant for gambling, his inability to keep his impulses in check-is quick and seamless; both Julie and James are happy to leave behind their usual haunts and start afresh. But this house, which sits between ocean and forest, has plans for the unsuspecting couple. As Julie and James try to settle into their home and their relationship, the house and its surrounding terrain become the locus of increasingly strange happenings. The architecture-claustrophobic, riddled with hidden rooms within rooms-becomes unrecognizable, decaying before their eyes. Stains are animated on the wall-contracting, expanding-and map themselves onto Julie's body in the form of bruises; mould spores taint the water that James pours from the sink. Together the couple embark on a panicked search for the source of their mutual torment, a journey that mires them in the history of their peculiar neighbours and the mysterious residents who lived in the house before Julia and James.
Written in creepy, potent prose, The Grip of It is an enthralling, psychologically intense novel that deals in questions of home: how we make it and how it in turn makes us, mapping itself onto bodies and the relationships we cherish.
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[Maybe we move in and we don't hear the intonation for a few days]***
(Titan Books, 3 September 2019, 288 pages, ebook, ARC from @TitanBooks and voluntarily reviewed)
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So this book was clearly going to be a win, win for me because I love haunted houses and I thought the title of the book was perfect. This book works on every level. It dazzled me. I was uneasy and on edge all the way through. My flesh was crawling, my skin was tingling and goosebumps were bumpy and goosy. It's all good. This book does not have in your face and out and out horror which I love because it can become crass and OTT. Instead, this book is eerie as hell, eerie as in what's that thing skittering in the corner I wet myself and I want my mummy type of eerie. I loved the way the author contrasts the characters relationship with the sense of utter wrongness about the house. The supernatural events become almost plausible. I loved the ending, not everything is explained and the creepiness in not undercut at all. I got lost in the book every time I picked it up, jumping at shadows and the creak of the bed as my other half turned in their sleep beside me. This is the kind of book that puts you edge until you're done.