Come Closer
in a nutshell: The story follows a nominally bright and normal gal who excitedly convinces her husband to buy a questionable gentrified loft, then makes the mistake of saying "yes" to a dangerous figure in a dream, and slowly realizes (then denies, then realizes, then explains away, again and again) that she is being fucking possessed by a demon who is already claws-deep in her and there is nowhere else to run.
main themes: the always-fun girlie experience of self-gaslighting; ignoring red flags; becoming your best You
the vibes: Possession, but in the form of a Cosmo magazine quiz. Like reading a really bleak diary in that the reader can clearly see what is going wrong but cannot reach through the page to shake the protagonist and yell "seek thee a priest!"
the writing: Quite good at building a growing sense of dread, while draining absolutely all hope out of you as everything Gets Worse. The prose is akin to a solid creepypasta. If you eat an edible and read it in the dark, it is genuinely a spooky fun way to spend an afternoon in a slim 166 pages.
A quick tale of a woman who is quite obviously being consumed by a demonic entity, but chooses to explain away all the evidence via stress, lack of sleep, bad luck, psychosis, and eventually, hysterics. Which, babe, definitely relatable! As adults who have emails to respond to and dinner parties to sludge through, I imagine the majority of us would try quite hard to maintain our sanity and grip on reality even in the face of demonic intervention- because, who has the time to deal with that, really. Who wants to acknowledge the problem as being that bad. It would make you feel quite small, alone, and being ignorant might seem the better alternative... until it's too late.
Gran does a good job of selling the reader on the initial fun of possession- Amanda (our dense-but-relatable tragic heroine) notices that her skin is clearer, people ask if she's had work done, her hair is thriving, and the boys are being brought to her yard. She starts to indulge her less savory desires: maybe steal a little lipstick, take a longer lunch break, put out a cigarette on my annoyingly bland husband's thigh. Sure, there is an incessant tap-tapping noise with no seeming origin that only appears throughout the apartment when she is home, but it's a really nice loft and she got a killer deal.
Amanda's life steadily goes to shit as the demon's hold grows, but homegirl keeps explaining it all away with the rationalization skills of a Scientologist, even after she somehow ends up with a book on demonic possession being sent to her apartment in lieu of the book on interior design she meant to order (??) replete with tips, a hotline, and a whole-ass Cosmo-style 'Are You Being Possessed?' quiz that she is clearly acing. I would just like to add that I don't think a teenage girl would be so willfully blind, which is partly why I think the best possession stories star them, not adults with insane justification skills.
"But you can't surprise a thing that lives inside you. The screams came out of my throat as long, dry coughs."
Who Doesn't Love A Cartesian Nightmare?
I like the idea of the demon taking the form of a childhood imaginary friend. So in Amanda's defense, if my imaginary friend from childhood appeared in my dreams professing love for me and asked to hang out, I would similarly give an emphatic 'yeah girl, of course!' Since it becomes evident later that the demon can manipulate memories, maybe she never actually had an imaginary friend, but either way, you can't win when the enemy lives in your mind. And that, of course, is what makes the entire experience so terrifying. A carnal haunting you can't escape. A haunted house one could theoretically physically leave, but if your body is the haunted house... you're fucked. Mentally, spiritually, emotionally haunted. What is you? What isn't? How could you even begin to tell?
Poor Amanda is never able to parse the differences between her and her demon, not until it's far too late. The tale ends in a bloodbath, which I don't want to give away, but I didn't stop rooting for Amanda the whole time, hoping against hope that she would just accept the grim reality of her situation and act upon it.
I read this on my phone while at work, and I hid in a dark storage area behind giant stacks of chairs in an effort to have a coffee break in peace. I sat there and read one of my favorite scenes, where Amanda is alone at home, determined to focus on anything other than the sporadic but incessant tap-tapping all throughout her apartment. She resolutely, intently stares down at a magazine in her lap. As she reads, in the back of her mind it clicks- those sounds aren't tapping, those are footsteps. Refusing to look away from the magazine, she hears that the footsteps aren't far from her, they're actually coming towards her. Not moving a muscle, she listens as the footsteps circle the couch, again and again, until she hears them stop right in front of her, as she re-reads the same sentence in the magazine for the sixth time, intently willing herself not to look up. As I was reading this part, I kept hearing sounds of people scuffling by all around me, unseen, until a coworker appeared out of the dark to ask "Oh hey, you hiding?" and at the sudden sound of his voice I almost leapt out of my skin. Fun!