Publisher’s Thoughts:

Julie and James settle into a house in a small town outside the city where they met. The move – prompted by James’ penchant for gambling, and 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. But this house, which sits between a lake and a forest, has plans for the unsuspecting couple.

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. The architecture – claustrophobic, riddled with hidden rooms within rooms – becomes unrecognizable, decaying before their eyes. 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. Together the couple embarks 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 Julie and James.

Written in creepy, potent prose, The Grip of It is an enthralling, psychologically intense novel that deals with questions of home: how we make it and how it in turn makes us, inhabiting the bodies and the relationships we cherish.

Staff Thoughts:

For horror fans, the classic haunted house story can always be a gamble to read – it has been done many times, and not always in a successful manner. However, The Grip of It is a fun and chaotic read. It shares the story of a married couple, Julie and James, seeking to escape their demons by moving to a small town for a fresh start. The house they find is unusual, to say the least, the neighbors are not welcoming, and strange things begin to happen to the couples’ health and relationship the longer they remain in the house. This book is genuinely tense and scary, and as it goes on the storytelling becomes more frenzied and frantic as the main characters lose touch with reality and with each other.

The Grip of It is one of the most unique horror novels I have read, not so much for the subject matter but for the style of the writing. Author Jac Jemc frequently and deftly switches the point of view between Julie and James, often without indicators or a pattern, which adds to the chaotic feel of this book.

Oftentimes I would find myself a page or two into a chapter before figuring out whose point of view I was looking through. At times this seemed distracting from the story, but it also contributed to the overall feeling of confusion and panic the characters deal with throughout the book. The pacing and setting of the story work well but connecting to the characters was a little difficult due to the constant jumping around. Even with that, it is still a fun read I would recommend for lovers of ghost stories and haunted houses.