Book Review: The Return (Audio Book) by Rachel Harrison / Women in Horror Month

Title: The Return

Author: Rachel Harrison

Publisher: Audible/Berkeley

Page Count: 304 Pages / 9 Hours, 34 Minutes

Publication Date/Year: 2020

Narrator: Sara Scott

Genre: Horror

Rachel Harrison’s debut novel, The Return, has been on my radar, probably since it published a couple of years ago. Three friends are surprised when their friend, Julie, disappears. Julie went hiking and never returned. Many people think she’s dead, but not Elise. Elise assumes Julie will return. She goes through the motions of attending the funeral (which happens a year after Julie disappears), but she also loses touch with Mae and Molly. Until Julie does return exactly two years after she vanished, Julie’s friends, Elise, Molly, and Mae, organize a weekend getaway at the Red Honey Inn, an exclusive, new, themed hotel in upstate New York. Julie is the last to arrive and this weekend is her friends to see her. Julie is much thinner, she looks sickly, a pale imitation of her former self. Julie is also acting strangely, for example, she now eats meat. Before she disappeared, she was a vegetarian. There are only occasional flashes of Julie’s former self.

Harrison frames her story through the voice of Elise, who as I suggested above, was the least concerned of her three “living” friends about Julie’s fate largely because she was closer to Julie than her other friends. Elise is a loner, somewhat self-imposed, compared to Mae and Molly. It was pretty easy to identify with Elise for me, Harrison did a nice job of making her situation grounded. For example, I thought it was a very nice touch that Elise expressed concern over the weekend getaway. First she thought it might be too much too soon, but second, and what gave the story that much more of a genuine feel is that Elise was concerned with the cost of going away to a fancy hotel. A seemingly small detail like that goes a long way to allowing the reader to “buy in” to what is happening in the story. Of course, with Elise as the narrator of the story, we only get her opinions on her friends and the situation.

Elise’s trepidation is a hint of the unsettling nature of the story that will unfold. A sense of dread slowly creeps into the story. The hotel is eerie, for starters. While it isn’t as haunted as say, the Overlook, it does give off a vibe of not quite being normal. The mountain setting doesn’t help, either. The limited number of staff, as Elise relays to us, come across as almost too perky. Each of the four characters is in their own themed room, each room feels like it could be in a Tim Burton movie.

As I said, the three friends realize Julie is very different. There’s an odor about her, Julie’s teeth are falling out, and she only seems to have an appetite for raw meat and alcohol. Elise soon thinks she’s seeing shadows moving, adding to her unease and an overall sense of being haunted. Julie’s presence continues to unnerve the three friends, with Mae and Molly urging Elise confront Julie about her memories and her appearance.

I don’t want to go too much further with plot details, but suffice it to say, Harrison does a fantastic job with an unsettling narrative. The creep factor increases as the novel heads to its inevitable conclusion, with some of the elements being explained, others not so much.

At times, Elise explained things that didn’t require explaining. But in the little moments, the intricacies of the friendship of these four women, Harrison excels. As I said, sometimes the smaller “devil in the detail” elements can pay it forward for the larger narrative. Overall, Harrison manages to infuse her narrative with a very strong pull that was difficult to deny.

An impressive horror debut. I’ve seen this novel labeled as a feminist horror and I suppose with the majority of characters being women (Tristan, Julie’s husband is the lone significant male character) I suppose that could be true. What The Return wound up being for me was a gripping, horror novel that was told with well-measured reveals. I guess I’d say folks who enjoyed the film The Descent would likely find a lot to like in this novel.

Highly Recommended

Book Review: Come Closer by Sara Gran

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