It’s not intended to be outright scary, instead it maintains an eerie tone (think VanderMeer’s Annihilation) and punctuates it with some genuine goosebump moments that snuck up on me. It’s been a few years since I’ve read anything that maintains this level of unease throughout. This short novel thoroughly creeped me the hell out. 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. 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 neighbors and the mysterious residents who lived in the house before Julia and James. Stains are animated on the wall-contracting, expanding-and map themselves onto Julie’s body in the form of bruises mold spores taint the water that James pours from the sink.

The architecture-claustrophobic, riddled with hidden rooms within rooms-becomes unrecognizable, decaying before their eyes. 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. But this house, which sits between ocean and forest, has plans for the unsuspecting couple. 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. Julie and James settle into a house in a small town outside the city where they met. Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It tells the eerie story of a young couple haunted by their new home. A chilling literary horror novel about a young couple who purchase and live in a haunted house.

The grip of it by jac jemc