The Grip of It
A Novel
ISBN10: 0374536910
ISBN13: 9780374536916
Trade Paperback
288 Pages
$17.00
CA$23.00
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.
Reviews
Praise for The Grip of It
"A page-turning psychological thriller . . . [The Grip of It] is the clever work of a writer who has patiently carved out her own home in contemporary fiction . . . as chilling as it is evocative."—Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune
"[The Grip of It] is a cerebral haunting in book form, a page-turning, suspenseful read that will stay with you long after you’ve finished it . . . The Grip of It stalks the reader through its pages with a silent, grayscale terror, like the brush of a web against your cheek in the dark . . . What makes this novel so powerful is the acknowledgement that intimacy does require a trust beyond logic, that “ruin” can come just as easily to the guilty or the guiltless, and an embrace of the chaos is sometimes the only way to make it out to the other side."—Matt Lewis, Electric Literature
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
1
THE REAL ESTATE AGENT, with his waxy hair and perma-smile, keeps stopping to listen, waving his hand, saying, “That’s just the house settling.”
We think the house seems more than settled and wonder why he’s calling...