Jac Jemc

Touring their prospective suburban home, Julie and James are stopped by a noise. Deep and vibrating, like throat singing. Ancient, husky, and rasping, but underwater. “That’s just the house settling,” the real estate agent assures them with a smile. He is wrong.
It's an intoxicating and enchanting from the very beginning. The story revolves around a couple from the city, James and Julie, moving to the countryside to escape the drama surrounding them and to get a fresh start. James show more suffers from an addiction to gambling and the couple relocates to try and rid themselves of this horrible dilemma. Insert typical introduction to all haunted house stories: couple finds a cheap house that is way too big for them but provides them rustic charm and latches onto their egos and dreams, couple purchases the house and decides to not do any research into why the massive house is so cheap, couple moves in immediately.

Once they move in, they realize that things aren't quite what it seems. There are shadows lurking around the house...random horrific growls coming from who knows where, and we're not sure we really what to know from what...little hidden rooms leading to areas of the house that would have no value or use for the average person...and a neighbor who won't stop watching them. This is just the start for the naive couple. The questions we need answers to are, 1. What exactly is wrong here? 2. What has James and Julie done to invoke these nightmarish plagues? And 3. Can they live long enough to find the answers?

It's not what would typically be called your every-day horror story...one that would have a lot of "in-your-face" gore and fright...however, the fright part is diffidently there, just not so much of the "gore". This is actually, mostly a psychological thriller, that is mixed with some paranormal...some suspense, and a domestic component that are all beautifully blended together with some minor horror-story features. The slow build-up is absolutely engaging. It will demand that you read to the very end show less

I did not like this book at all. Haunted houses are one of my favorite horror tropes, and I think this book actually ended up on my to-read list from a list of books about haunted houses, which makes it especially disappointing. The “horror” aspects of the story were interesting at first: the hidden passageways and secret compartments in the house, the mysterious bruises appearing out of nowhere, the strange dilation of time and space that happens in and around the house—all of it is show more definitely creepy, but eventually it veers into the territory of being over-the-top and melodramatic. I like horror that uses its characters’ emotions and perceptions to its advantage—psychological horror is a great subgenre and one of my favorites—but I don’t think The Grip of It does it well at all. I assume the intent was to keep the reader guessing: is there actually something wrong with the house? Is it ghosts? Is it toxic mold? Are these people just both mentally ill? Is it a folie a deux situation? Are they gaslighting each other? That kind of uncertainty and doubt can work very well, but here it just sort of irritated me. I didn’t like either of the main characters and found myself wanting to reach through the pages and give them both a good shake. Oooh, the spooky house is actually a metaphor for your unstable marriage? Go to marriage counseling! Communicate with each other! If your first impulse is to distrust your spouse, you shouldn’t be with them! And for god’s sake, move out of the fucking house!
More egregious than the failed attempt at psychological horror, to me, was the writing. I accept that authors have different writing styles, and I also realize that the way this novel was written was likely intentional, but it was just horrible, in my opinion. The writing feels very passive, even when things are happening in the present moment. Nothing is written about like it’s currently happening, so everything feels like a recollection: we did this, then we did that, then this happened, et cetera. Considering the fact that the novel is written in present tense (which would bother me no matter what), the overall effect is strange, almost dreamlike. I realize that that was almost certainly intentional on the part of the author, and it admittedly does fit with the “theme” of the book, but it was so incredibly grating to read. The novel ends up being one in which things do happen, but reading it gives you the impression that nothing has happened. A couple of other things that really bothered me about the writing: sometimes the chapters are narrated by James, sometimes by Julie, but there is no indication at the beginning of a chapter of who is narrating, so sometimes you don’t know until you read the name of the other person. While I did kind of like that idea and might not hate it in a different book, combined with the weird passive narration it got old very quickly. There was also very little characterization beyond the characters’ flaws; neither of them seemed like real, complex people, which made it hard to care about anything that happened to them.
I just did not like it. Some of the horror concepts were cool, and I feel like I kind of get the whole idea behind the novel, but it just… was not working for me. I do have Jac Jemc’s collection of short stories on my Calibre shelf, and the optimist in me wants to give it a shot, but I don’t think I can get through another book written like this one was. Overall, huge disappointment. show less

This is a fantastic horror novel, so beautifully told and with such believable characters that it's all the more horrifying. I also love the way the novel unfolds with ambiguity as well as character depth, and this is one of those rare cases where I don't mind so much that the author doesn't necessarily work to show us whether we're talking about a bad place or a haunted place; the situation is so real, so terrifying, that that distinction becomes less powerful and important because we're so show more engaged with the danger involved.

All told, this is an original work of horror that I absolutely adored, and I can't wait to read more from the author. show less

I really like haunted house stories although I haven't read that many. I've mostly watched haunted house movies and read like... Goosebumps. This was exactly my kind of horror though. It's atmospheric and spooky. It was realistic but in an eerie supernatural type way. I really like that the reader is left guessing what exactly is going on. The characters act like pretty normal people given the weird situation and there are plausible explanations given, but at the same time it just doesn't show more seem like those could really explain everything.. I thought the ending was quite successful as well. It felt very classic in a way.

I liked both the characters as well and I really liked the balance between their perspectives. Both had real reasons to distrust each other but I also believed in their relationship. It sort of felt like a case of folie a deux which I find compelling.

There were some moments when I thought the book might have been alluding to something I wasn't getting, especially towards the end with Julie's behavior. That didn't really bother me much, although there was one moment at the end that felt like a pretty serious escalation. Then again, most of their experiences up to that point were pretty crazy as well.

Anyways, I liked this and I would really like to read some more haunted house stories. I really appreciate atmospheric, psychological horror and weirdness. Good stuff. It kind of reminded me of Our Wives Under the Sea but without the lesbians and a different setting. The relationships in both just feel somewhat similar and the type of writing/horror, although Our Wives was more supernatural. show less