The Grip of It
in a nutshell: To save their marriage after the confession of a gambling addiction throws their plans off, a young couple leaves the city for an old house in a rural town by a lake. Their dogged desires to thrive in this new life and focus on rejuvenating their relationship keep them from bringing up certain worries to one another: are the townspeople acting off? Did you hear that deep, vibrating noise from the walls? Are you writing strange things for me to find? Are you messing with my dreams? Did you bruise me somehow when I wasn't looking? Why aren't you going to work? Did the treeline move in the night? Are you trying to drive me crazy? Do you even love me anymore?
the vibes: You the reader are a marriage counselor having separate sessions with both parties, hearing their differing versions of the same creepy happenings, witnessing them grow quietly angrier and crazier at and over one another, but you cannot get them to just speak directly to each other. Also, their spooky next-door neighbor has a hidden history with their house and the family that lived there before them, but your clients like can't even focus on that right now cause they're too busy being haunted and trying to get their partner to see things from their POV.
main themes: How to place your trust in a partner after they've broken it, what you're willing to sacrifice for stability, what you ask of another and what partners owe to each other, and haunted fucking houses, baby.
the writing: As a comment on r/horrorlit put it, this is more literary than horror. More domestic suspense than jump scare, this quick-paced novel is split between dueling husband and wife narrations, which allows for more ambiguity over what is actually happening here. Entire chapters were written in dangerous fugue states, could possibly have been fever dreams, or maybe fervent wishes. I personally LIVE for ambiguous story-telling, LOVE a wide-open ending that is fully up to interpretation. But if that isn't your thing, know that going in. I found Jemc's prose to be as chilling as it was lovely, so while it was relatively bloodless I had a wonderfully sick time reading about this couple's doom.
"I tell myself not to discredit my husband's ability to predict the odds, that I'm trusting my own instinct, not his. I tell myself we can win even if he agrees with me."
If, as I love to quote, every haunted house story is actually the story of a family in trauma, this house is witness (& perhaps instigator) to a distrustful but eager couple's deteriorating marriage and health. In order to not be The Crazy One, they are loath to confide in one another when they "hear the giggles of children but don't see the bodies of children." They dismiss their own fears, so as not to add to the collective unease. As the couple's mental states and attitudes change, they are reluctant to call the other out on their behavior-- like not going into work, tracing their shadows on the wallpaper with markers to see if they change, waking up in a cave on the beach-- and become quietly more bitter towards one another, interspersed with bouts of intense dependency. Love as mania, love as effort, like sanity is effort.
"I kiss her cheek. I tell her we're alone now, as if it were a comfort. She knows what it is like to speak a lie aloud to make it feel more true."
I enjoy time loss and dreams that bleed into premonition and inexplicable spatial inconsistencies in haunted houses, especially those on page. Several times the wife unlocks her front door only to step into her neighbor's living room, or out the backdoor instead of into her home. The topography of a space that is supposed to be yours, supposed to be known to you like the back of your hand, being unreliable and potentially a betrayer-- it's so unsettling. We want our homes to keep us, to be the sites where we feel most ourselves. If that safety is perverted, it can feel like a personal perversion. Or perhaps we are the perversion, lashing out at an innocent house, blaming the wallpaper's stains for our own sins.
Jemc expertly pours the strangeness of a haunted space into the strangeness of trying to know and be known by another person, so her entire story becomes an Escher-esque tale of rot on the walls as well as the flesh. Truly an engaging and rewarding read.
"I search for proof that the world is one way rather than another, but it doesn't matter what is coming from inside us or around us. Our brains allow it either way. We can lose ourselves behind a trapdoor, whether in our mind, in one another, or in the house."