The Grip of It: A Novel

"But what if those buried, fetid stories are the ones that have bubbled to the surface? What if they're right there, balanced on the edge of our teeth, ready to trip into the world without even our permission?"

And what if you have practically no idea what the bloody Hell you're actually reading, curled up in your sofa, and yet you cannot help being hypnotized chapter after chapter? Because this is what happened with "The Grip Of It". This book does grip you and leave you wondering and when you reach the last page, you're still uncertain but you know you've enjoyed the journey. This is how I felt about the novel that kicked off my Halloween reads.

James and Julie are our protagonists. A young couple that decides to leave the big city and show more start a new life in a small town and a new house. They want to mend certain unhappy choices of the past and look to a cleaner, more innocent future. Their house, however, is anything but innocent. It seems alive, inhospitable. So far, there is nothing groundbreaking in the plot, the virtue of this novel isn't its originality but its powerful writing. This book is like a good ghost film that we watch again and again, always closing our eyes, hiding behind a pillow in the same jumpscares.

After a striking Prologue, we enter the heart of the action right away. The narration is told in both James' and Julie's point of view, in Present tense, like a voice -over. The chapters are like snippets from the couple's life in the house. The foreboding images are plenty. There is the constant presence of woods and waves, the earth and the water elements, both risky, symbolic and powerful. Voices of happy children can be heard, but they're not seen. Ever. In fact, the town seems almost deserted and the few residents seem to know there is something amiss but are unwilling to get involved. The forest surrounding the house seems to move closer, somehow. There is a constant humming noise, there are cracks, drawings on the walls appearing out of nowhere and an old, weird neighbour who may be an intruder.

James and Julie are very sympathetic characters, flowed and realistic. The phenomena largely affect Julie, as is often the case in supernatural occurrences. I can't begin to tell you how sorry I felt for her and I believe James was a fine equivalent to her strength, no matter his flaws. And there were many. Connie, on the other hand, is insufferable. A nosy hysterical who pretends to be interested in Julie's welfare. Why does every mystery seem to need an irritating busybody? I think we'd be much better without their ghastly presence.

I can't say more and I fear I've already said too much. What is so engaging, even frightening if you like, is the psychological effect of the haunting. The book passes beyond the supernatural thriller and becomes a psychological observation. Yes, at certain times, it becomes a bit repetitive and unnecessarily wordy, but overall it is a very satisfying effort. In my opinion, this is everything "The Upstairs Room" wasn't....

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ show less

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 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 show more 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 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 show more 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 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.

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 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 show more 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

Terry: Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It (2017) made the long list for the Bram Stoker Award for 2017, and for good reason: it’s delightfully frightening, and refuses to be set down before the reader has finished it. We both loved it.

Here’s the premise: James and Julie have decided to leave the city for a small town a good distance away, looking for a clean break from financial problems (though Julie has determined she is not going to harp on how James gambled all of his nest egg away; she’s just glad the joint account is still intact). They’ve decided to buy an older home with lots of closets and dark wood, with a forest starting right where the backyard ends. There’s a weird sound in the house that the real estate agent assures show more them is just the house settling, but they’re charmed past that by all of the secret compartments; there are closets inside closets, a revolving wall that reveals a hidden room in the basement, and cavities in dropped ceilings. And the place is cheap besides.

But the house is — well, weird — almost from the moment they move in. And it’s not just the house, but everything around it. The neighbor is aggressively unfriendly. The children play a game called “Murder” in the woods behind their house. The backyard seems to vary in size; sometimes the woods are farther away, sometimes they’re closer. The people in town behave strangely when they learn where James and Julie live. Soon Julie develops deep, huge bruises. Her friend and coworker worries that James is hurting Julie, and remains suspicious when Julie denies it. Slowly, quietly, the house becomes more and more menacing, the neighbor more hostile, reality more malleable.

Julie and James tell the story from their very different points of view, mostly in short alternating chapters. It is an effective way to tell this story, because the reader is never sure whether this is a story of a marriage falling apart or of a strong marriage being tested by a haunted house, or both. Are Julie and James both unreliable narrators? Or is the house truly haunted?

Jac Jemc skillfully builds her story, piling detail upon detail, incident upon incident, until the horror of James and Julie’s experience is nearly unbearable — even though Jemc does not indulge in the sort of bloody scene that characterizes so much horror fiction. The Grip of It is quiet, the menace growing gradually, until it envelopes the reader so completely that it is hard to shake free from the mood so ably established by sharp writing. Jemc has clearly learned from such works as Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. James and Julie’s house on Stillwater will join Manderley from Du Maurier’s Rebecca and Thornfield Hall from Bronte’s Jane Eyre as literary houses you only want to visit in the pages of a book, never in real life.

The Grip of It by Jac Jemc horror book reviewsTerry: Marion, I was genuinely frightened by this book, which doesn’t happen all that often any more, given how much horror fiction I’ve read. This is the kind of book that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up while you’re reading. I found myself unwilling to turn out the light and go to bed late at night — not just because it was a difficult book to put down, but also because I didn’t really want to know what was hiding in the darkness. Even my black cat started to seem scary!

Marion: I could not put it down, and read it straight through, and then scared myself not once but twice. I sat bolt upright in bed when I heard a noise outside the house. Having survived that one, I gave myself palpitations when, the next morning, I went down the hall to turn on the furnace and saw a shadow in our guest room. It was the usual shadow thrown by the lamp that has always been in that corner, but when you read The Grip of It, you’ll understand why that was terrifying.

Terry: We learn a good bit about Julie in the course of this book, from her work to her friends to how she and James met and fell in love. James is considerably less forthcoming, seeming almost secretive not just in how little he shares with us in his chapters, but also about his background and life before he met Julie. That makes it easier to suspect that he is somehow to blame for what’s happening.

Marion: I thought there were several interesting things about James. You and I discussed one earlier. In the final third of the book, James and Julie go to stay with Julie’s friend. While they are out for dinner, the house is vandalized. The friend obviously suspects James (and the story leaves room for James to have done it), and the police immediately treat him like a suspect. At this point we learn that he has an Indian last name, and I wondered if the police were overreacting from racism, or simply because the male intimate partner is the most obvious suspect. Is racism, undiscussed, part of the tension between James and Julie? But Jemc is so good at giving us possibilities. The strangeness might have an organic cause like mold, right? Or it could be the neighbor, couldn’t it? I think the reason The Grip of It was scary was that our sense of the malleability of reality grows right along with Julie’s and James’s. Jemc’s ability to create a scene that is completely compelling in its details, and then pull the rug out from under the reader, is unparalleled.

Generally, the way these characters are revealed in sparse chapters, even with all the focus of the strangeness of the house, is brilliant. My take is that James and Julie are having problems, although Julie is confident that they caught James’s gambling early enough. We see and hear enough about Julie and her troubled relationship with her step-mother to get the sense that she’s not completely stable either, though. I love how caught up I was by these flawed people who nevertheless loved each other and are clearly being menaced by something.

Terry: I’ve always loved books with unreliable narrators, and this one had two of them. James seems less reliable as a life partner as the plot develops, but Julie seems prone to confabulation. Marion, you say that you believe that their marriage is in trouble, but how could a marriage survive the stresses of a house that draws them into hidden spaces that they sometimes can’t find their way out of? Or is it that they are imagining the latter situation? Which came first here, the chicken or the egg? I went back and forth on this a dozen times. It put me in mind of Caitlín Kiernan’s The Red Tree and even, to some extent, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita — I never knew what to believe and what to write off as an exaggeration or a sign of mental illness or a story Julie made up about James or vice versa. Marion, do you think there was an entity or a force? Do you think it was a ghost?

Marion: I think The Red Tree is a great comparison!

While I think two people can love each other and still have problems, and that marriages can weather tough times, I believe was something evil in that area, and I don’t see how it would be a ghost. I think much of what they both thought they saw was imagined, but those imaginary images were encouraged, or even placed there, by something.

I read The Grip of It because Terry recommended it. It scared me, but I’m glad I read it because it is one of best-done “really bad house” books I’ve ever read. Jemc knows just when to place her icy fingers on your nape and watch your shivers.

Terry: I’ve been recommending The Grip of It a lot, and have even bought a couple of copies for friends. And I immediately purchased Jemc’s previous two books, a novel and a book of short stories. Even if they’re not fantasy or horror in any way, I want to read them, because this woman really has a gift. I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next!

Written with Marion Deeds. Originally published at http://www.fantasyliterature.com/reviews/the-grip-of-it/ show less

First-time homeownership is supposed to be a dream come true. But in The Grip of It by Jac Jemc, it becomes a nightmare of near catastrophic proportions. James and Julie, a young couple accustomed to the easy distractions and conveniences of urban living, decide to leave the city, where James has proven himself vulnerable to a compulsion for gambling, and start anew. The house they buy is near a small town in a suburban/semi-rural neighbourhood. The forest borders their property and a lake is not far away. Even as they view the house, an issue arises: a mysterious hum or drone that seems to emanate from everywhere at once. But regardless, they make the purchase and move in. Among the first unsettling things they notice is their show more neighbour, Rolf, the elderly man living next door, who always seems to be watching them out his window. When they approach him, seeking to make his acquaintance, he rudely invites them to leave him alone. Soon after this he disappears. By then the odd occurrences are in full swing: the relentless hum, drawings and stains that appear on the walls, flitting nighttime shadows, oddly patterned bruises that spontaneously appear on Julie’s body. The weirdness extends beyond the house to the forest, where they hear sounds of invisible children playing, and to the lake, where there is a cave with etchings on the walls that echo those found in the house. All through the house they discover hidden rooms and passageways that are not architecturally consistent with the building’s outward appearance. James and Julie suspect a haunting, though neither of them believe in such things. In search of an answer, they begin tracing the history of the house, and discover stories of tragedy and peculiar behaviour involving Rolf’s family. Eventually their mistrust of their own senses leaks into their feelings for each other, and the couple’s relationship sinks to its nadir when they begin suspecting each other of playing a clandestine role in this series of strange events. Jemc’s unnerving narrative is psychologically astute and genuinely spooky. The many brief chapters are narrated alternately by Julie and James in evocative, staccato prose, a strategy that ramps up the tension to a fever pitch. With Julie and James both unable to explain what is happening and both behaving not just oddly but sometimes against their own best interests, the sense of dread mounts. In The Grip of It, Jac Jemc has written a smart and creepy page turner in the tradition of Shirley Jackson. It is also a sophisticated novel, one that explores the breakdown of reason when confronted by events that are truly inexplicable. show less