Welcome to the Speculative Chic Book Club! Each month, we invite you to join us in reading a book that will sometimes be picked beforehand and sometimes be voted on by you, our readers. We’re still working on the format, so following the review of the book and some starter questions, we invite you all to discuss your thoughts in the comments.

The Grip Of It (2017)
Written by: Jac Jemc Pages: 273 (Trade Paperback)

Publisher: FSG Originals

Why I nominated it for book club: I wanted something that was supposed to be scary, and this was recommended on several lists.

Premise:

Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It is a chilling literary horror novel about a young couple haunted by their newly purchased home

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.

The move — prompted by James’s penchant for gambling and his general inability to keep his impulses in check — is quick and seamless; both Julie and James are happy to start afresh. But this house, which sits between a lake and a forest, has its own plans for the unsuspecting couple. As Julie and James try to establish a sense of normalcy, the home and its surrounding terrain become the locus of increasingly strange happenings. The framework — 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 painful, grisly bruises.

Like the house that torments the troubled married couple living within its walls, The Grip of It oozes with palpable terror and skin-prickling dread. Its architect, Jac Jemc, meticulously traces Julie and James’s unsettling journey through the depths of their new home as they fight to free themselves from its crushing grip.

This review contains lots of spoilers, as will the discussion in the comments below. If you have finished the book yet, check back! We’ll still be here.

Discussion: I read this book in one sitting on one of my days off, and I’m not sure if it’s because I read it in daylight or because it genuinely just didn’t . . . . grip me that well, but this did book didn’t really deliver for me on the scary front. Unsettling? Sure, slightly at times, but I felt there was a lot in it that was left unexplored.

I couldn’t help but compare it to House of Leaves, which I read in college and which absolutely freaked me out for the entire time I was reading it. This book had more of a daydream quality to it. They went somewhere, woke up somewhere else, there was always a question of what was actually happening and what wasn’t. The neighbor appeared and disappeared. They took the evil with them to other locations but then, at the end, are somehow able to just sell the house and move away? While technically, I guess, they were in some sort of peril most of the way through the book, it just didn’t feel that immediate to me. I was never worried for their lives.

There just seemed to be a lot of things that didn’t feel fully developed. I expected, from the very beginning, that the extra rooms would have more impact on the plot than just Julie getting stuck in one for a brief period of time. Not that I expected it to steal the plot from House of Leaves, but there’s plenty you can do with extra rooms without making it an endless house. Who was sleeping in the cot James found behind the wall? What was with the empty column next to their bedroom?

And in the end, I think I’m disappointed that we didn’t get anything approaching a reason. Was it haunted by Rolf’s family? Was someone’s body buried out back? Was Rolf’s family also haunted by the house? Where is Rolf?

For all the ways it fell short for me, I did really like the construction of the novel: the changing points of view, the close first person narration. Jemc does have a handle on the poetry of prose narration that I really found lovely at times. I just wish the end result had been more interesting.

Discussion questions: (as always, these are just conversation starters, you do not need to answer them to participate in discussion)

1. Will the haunting follow Julie and James after they sell the house, or do you believe they’re rid of it? Why do you think so?

2. It seemed that this was mostly Julie’s haunting. She was the one who lost the most time, who ended up with physical bruises. Why do you think that might be? Or am I wrong, did they manifest equally?

3. I clearly wasn’t swept away by the creepiness of the plot, but were you? What especially worked for you or didn’t?

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