Book Review - "Come Closer" by Sara Gran

When I was working at the bookstore one day, a customer came in with a stack of unremarkable books to trade in. It's a well-known fact that I'm a huge horror fan, but horror books are few and far between these days unless you scour the small independent presses and vanity publishing houses. The customer selected a very thin little book from her stack and slid it toward me.

"Read this," she said, giving me a knowing nod before heading off to browse.

The book was literally thinner than most of the young adult books we shelve, and an odd size that was smaller than a trade paperback but larger than a mass market one. It was a sleek black book with a woman on the cover, a woman in a white dress, and the book read simply 'Come Closer'.

Intrigued, I took it home and promptly forgot about it until I was waiting for something to download on my new computer. I had the book sitting next to my desk, so I picked it up to thumb through. Forty-seven pages later, I had forgotten all about my download and was halfway through with the book anyway.

The story is a simple one that's been told time and time again in outlets like Paranormal Activity, The Exorcist, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, A Haunting in Connecticut and dozens of others older than those. The novel introduces us to Amanda, a mid-thirties architect married to the responsible and all-American financial advisor Edward, who live in a quaint, neat loft in the city. Amanda used to be a depressed, angry person who smoked and couldn't manage her money, but Ed put her entirely into check with his organized, calm ways. When Amanda was a child, she had an imaginary friend, a woman who cared for her, but as Amanda grew older the imaginary friend eventually vanished.

The book begins with Amanda having another dream about this person, a dream where the imaginary friend tells her that she won't ever leave her. In her waking life, Amanda begins to notice unusual occurences, primarily a rhythmic tapping knock on the inside of the walls of the loft. She becomes outwardly resentful and hostile of Edward, taking up smoking again, stopping by a bar to get drunk on her way home, flirting with other men. As the book progresses, Amanda sees a psychic advisor who tells her that she is possessed by a demon and needs to clean herself. However, the exorcism they attempt only makes the demon stronger, and Amanda begins to lose touch with her sense of self and give in to the evil presence inside of her.

While I think the book is very good, it's far from the terrifying read the blurbs on the cover would have you believe. Its structure is actually its most original asset; having a very short, concise book that doesn't give a lot of backstory but rather allows you glimpses into the past that you connect yourself using context clues is a very fun take on the classic exorcism tale. We know little to nothing about Amanda and Ed; they are archetypes like The Sims, people whose specifics could be tailored to anyone's face to make the story  more personal for the reader. We can all see a bit of ourselves in Amanda, a bit of our partners in Ed; we all can relate to the feelings of resentment and quietly-bottled irritation of being in close quarters with someone who is maddeningly logical when you want to throw things and scream. And moreover, there are several betrayals and twists in the story that make it so that you never know for sure if Amanda IS demonically possessed or if she's just going through some sort of midlife-crisis/breakdown in her personal life due to her briefly-referenced history of mental instability.

Worth checking out, and a very quick read (I finished the book in less than two hours). Sara Gran has done a few other very short little works and I'm looking forward to picking those up simply because I enjoy her writing style; she gets to the point and delivers with realistic dialogue and interesting situations.