Book Title: The Grip of It
Author: Jac Jemc
Publisher: FSG
Number of pages: 276
Genre: horror, fiction, thriller, mystery
Release Date: August 1, 2017
Favorite Quotes:
“Deaf to the sound, until the still silence of ownership settles over us. Maybe we decide we will try to like the noise. Maybe we find comfort in it. Maybe an idea insists itself more easily than an action.”
“I squeeze James’s hand and he squeezes back because we have this way of feeling the same about the unexpected, and I know, like me, he is excited about the secret passages, this being one of the places where we are seamed together, just one instance where we twist in the same spot, mirroring each other and meshing at once.”
“No,” I say full of honesty and endangered pride, “because it worked out perfectly: he’s the one I wanted, and I was the one he wanted.”
“I think I was looking for someone very different from me and it wasn’t worth thinking about rationally, because I’d cut myself off at the knees every time evaluating the ways the men fell short. Maybe it was me who stayed tuned in to him and so he’s the one who ended up sticking around.”
“It doesn’t seem like a secret that’s trying to be kept.”
“I feel like I’ve turned a full circle inside myself, like I am due to unwind, like I am a spring coiled tight, waiting.”
“I sense a secret in the misses of the conversation.”
“She’s quiet for a moment. I know our minds pause to shape themselves around that same possibility, of admitting a mistake and moving on, but she spins out of that current.”
“We run out of things to tell each other. We share second and even third-tier stories we’d never bother other people with. Those minutiae calcify into the bones of our intimacy.”
“A photo is reflections of light. Everything invisible comes together to show you something.”
“Right, but empathy can only take you so far. You’ve got to have a little objective distance, too, so you can see what needs to change.”
“It feels more like something to the space between James and me, though, like an electricity that’s been turned on since we’ve taken up this new life, something that buzzes at its highest frequency when we’re both home, together, I go along with the idea that James might be the biggest part of the problem so that I don’t scare Connie off. I need her right now.”
“I cry on the couch, feeling the gap that’s formed between us widening when we’d hoped this move would close it.”
“When I was a child, I feared the day I would identify what I wanted to do. What I wanted was to stay free. The worst nightmare appeared to be recognizing how you wanted the world to change.”
“What is worse? To be confronted with an obvious horror, or to be haunted by a never-ending premonition of what’s ahead?”
“I feel envy for people with ordinary lives. My analytical mind ties itself in knots trying to reason through our situation, almost as if trying to understand what’s happening is making it worse.”
“Maybe she turned abstract shadows on the wall into some sort of language. Something imaginary can stick. Something false can feel real.”
““I think it is, Jules. I think we’re haunting ourselves. We’re pulling ourselves apart. We’re noticing gaps and stepping into them instead of avoiding them.””
“I decide it is best if I note where I end and the world begins, boundaries to be defended.”
“Compassion fatigue. How there is no limit to how many times you can tell a person. I understand. How it might still not be enough. How language lies mostly in the flourishes that catch our ears. How language can sometimes only be heard in its consequences. How it can’t stop being heard after that. How it might be easier to know what to say than when not to speak. How both silence and speech can expand until you’re tightly in a corner…”
“That is just to say there is no sense in knowing where the line is drawn. We can mark the place that indicates This is how much we can take; we can monitor it, but that line, nevertheless, constantly moves.”
Goodreads Synopsis:
A chilling literary horror novel about a young couple who purchase and live in a haunted house. Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It tells the eerie story of a young couple haunted by their new home.
Julie and James settle into a house in a small town outside the city where they met. The move—prompted by James’s penchant for gambling, 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 ocean and 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 embark 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 Julia and James.
Written in creepy, potent prose, The Grip of It is an enthralling, psychologically intense novel that deals in questions of home: how we make it and how it in turn makes us, mapping itself onto bodies and the relationships we cherish.
My Review:
In the beginning, there was great visualization to her writing and manifestation to how the characters were feeling. I did initially like where the plot was going and the “creepy” aspect. I imagined this book being a mini-series on Netflix like Bly Manor or The Haunting of Hill House. The build-up was good but then halfway through, it felt like the plot just faltered. I had no idea whatsoever what the characters were going through, as well as the character development. Maybe the author did this on purpose, but I couldn’t get a grasp on what the author was relaying to the reader. High marks for the initial suspense, but, in the end, The Grip of It missed the mark.
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