Title: Come Closer
Author: Sara Gran
Publisher: Soho Press
Page Count: 166 Pages
Publication Date/Year: 2003
Genre: Horror
Possession. One of the more rife subjects explored in horror novels. Sara Gran’s Come Closer takes a powerful approach to examine how easily such a possession can destroy a person.
Amanda and her husband Ed live happily in New York City, she’s an architect, he’s a financial guy for a prominent women’s clothing company. Gran gets things moving immediately … Amanda is called into her boss’s office after he reads the proposal she placed on his desk, pages of vicious and vulgar attacks. Amanda can’t explain it, but she knows the words spoke truth to his deviant behavior. At home that night, she and Ed hear strange noises in their home, noises in the wall they attribute to pipes or mice. These noises continue to occur for a few days. Rather innocuous, since they live in an older house. I live in a house built in the 1950s, I hear noises all the time and have come to dismiss them as just normal “house noises.”
Strange things begin to occur… A stray dog she befriended and began training growls and backs away from her. Amanda finds herself arguing with Ed with more frequency, something they didn’t typically do before we met her at the beginning of Come Closer. Things that she previously brushed off, Ed’s late nights, his friends quirks, begin to annoy her even more. Amanda comes across a book, Demon Possession Past and Present with a quiz a person can take to assess whether or not they are possessed. Things like blacking out without having taken drugs or alcohol (Amanda has spaces of time she can’t recall), finding yourself picking up habits (like smoking) you’d given up or never had. Amanda takes the quiz a few times over the course of the story.
Accompanying the aberrant behavior are dreams Amanda has of a woman on a red beach who proclaims her need for Amanda, her love, and who promises to never leave. As her behavior becomes more disturbing to herself, Amanda’s life unravels. There’s a part of her that takes an almost sick glee in the destructive behavior, while another battles for control against the demon she believes to be Naamah.
Gran tells the story in Amanda’s matter-of-fact first person voice. That, for me, might be the most terrifying element of the story, just how “normal” some of the deplorable behavior and events are delivered. I had to re-read some passages with an unspoken “WAIT WHAT?” in my brain.
There’s a small hint that perhaps Amanda is suffering a psychotic break and Gran smartly has Amanda visit both a psychiatrist and a spiritual advisor to help her remedy her problem. This leads to the inevitable question I have about first person stories, is this a reliable narrator? That unreliable narrator element adds another level of dread, especially as Gran brings the novel towards its powerful conclusion.
My wife read Come Closer a few years ago. I vaguely remember her recommending it to me and she thought highly enough about the book that she wanted to keep it. I saw the book being mentioned over the last year on various blogs and books-ta-grammers and decided to finally dive in. I read in essentially one sitting on a gloomy January Sunday and it was a perfect reading experience.
Powerful, gripping, believable creepy, and utterly unsettling.
Highly Recommended
