A recurrent, unidentifiable noise in her apartment. A memo to her boss that’s replaced by obscene insults. Amanda—a successful architect in a happy marriage—finds her life going off-kilter by degrees. She starts smoking again, and one night for no reason, without even the knowledge that she’s doing it, she burns her husband with a cigarette. At night she dreams of a beautiful woman with pointed teeth on the shore of a blood-red sea.
The new voice in Amanda’s head, the one that tells her to steal things and talk to strange men in bars, is strange and frightening, and Amanda struggles to wrest back control of her life. A book on demon possession suggests that the figure on the shore could be the demon Naamah, known to scholars of the Kabbalah as the second wife of Adam, who stole into his dreams and tricked him into fathering her child. Whatever the case, as the violence of her erratic behavior increases, Amanda knows that she must act to put her life right or see it destroyed.
Horror Book Review Blog: Come Closer
A series of events begin to disrupt Amanda’s life which leads to a downward spiral that forces our protagonist, and her husband, Ed, to question her sanity. An altered memo at her job that nearly results in her termination, a tapping noise in her home that seems to taunt her, and an old habit (smoking) thought to have long been conquered resurface at the behest, and disgust, of Ed. What is happening to Amanda and where are these carnal thoughts coming from?
Come Closer by Sara Gran came highly recommended by various sources in the interwebs being billed as scary, frightening, and downright disturbing. And so, I had high hopes for this. To say that Come Closer was poorly written and disengaging would be incorrect as it was quite the opposite Gran’s writing was fantastic and the words proved to flow congruently throughout. Despite this, there was not much in the way of keeping me fully engaged in the narrative neither was it scary by any stretch other than imagination.
While this book was built as terrifying, it is anything but. I would say that this fell more in line with disturbing as a common trope in a possession narrative is that it can be attributed to a mental disorder. Was that the case in Come Closer? It’s possible however it’s not spelled out for you. Gran’s voice of our main protagonist, Amanda, lends itself to conjuring up emotions of sorrow, frustration, anger, and confusion. These emotions are a result of our heroins’ issue of demonic possession which starts to exhibit uncharacteristic traits from Sarah. The demonic possession angle is unorthodox in that there is no green vomit, heads spinning, or levitations – tropes that we are familiar with and come to expect on some level or degree. This is not so with Come Closer.
I had high expectations with the rave reviews this short novel has gained. But, as is usually the case, having such high expectations only sets yourself up for disappointment which was the case for me after reading this novel. The positive is that this was indeed a short novel (under 200 pages) and Gran’s writing was exceptional albeit not enough to captivate me and keep my attention focused or interested. Again, I blame my expectations. I expected to be enthralled and immersed in a frightening take that was prone to keep me up at night. Again, this was not the case. Instead, the only fear that was conjured was the thought of my wife suffering from the same dilemma that Sara experienced.