Reviews

The Grip of It by Jac Jemc

Only show reviews with written explanations

luminous's review against another edition

4.0

I've sat on it a few days and I've decided that The Grip of It didn't stick the landing. However, it's still fun to think about what it means. Before I get the spoiler tags going, I'll sum it up as: It's both tied up in a bow with things perfectly explained and a pretty happy ending but it's also got tons of lingering questions that leave the reader uneasy. Are we to buy this neat explanation? But if we do, do we just decide to ignore the inexplicable? Is this what Julie and James are doing?

Spoiler

Are Julie and James in full hallucinatory mode now?

That the book still leaves me with these thoughtful questions makes me rate it 4 stars. The relationship was natural and believable, and both protagonists were likeable even for their flaws.

Spoiler

But I'm still disappointed. If the moral of the story is that Julie and James are deep "in the grip of" the haunted house's machinations and have created an imaginary reality, that's kind of cool. But that's me reaching, because it's not very firmly implied in the text. Maybe it really was ergot all along. But what was Rolf? What was the point? That Julie and James travel through a great ordeal in order to repair their relationship? I do not like that so many things happened only to be utterly irrelevant.

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Progress: 74% - LOVING it! No idea why the low ratings. This is great so far! Lots of creepy happenings. And some extremely unsettling happenings, such as James talking to Julie in one room and then talking to her in the next room he goes into, and he barely notices that one of them coundn't have been Julie. And that's the other thing: The house makes them slow, and their thinking muddled, and they don't even notice they've become slovenly and basically living in filth.

I don't even want to find out what James thinks is his basement darkroom actually is.

This book is sneaky that way. It's all in first person present, two POVs that alternate chapter to chapter. So we get no omniscient narration holding our hand and telling us what they're really seeing or what they are really acting like or the reason Julie has those weird bruises. That's taken care of through the reactions of others, like Julie's wonderful friend (Connie?) or the police. But hey, even those are filtered through Julie and James. Maybe they are different or not even real.

I'm not really big into haunted houses unless all or part of the haunting is due to the house having some evil baked in, something that gives the horror an unknowable, cosmic horror feeling. One
thing that gives a haunted house story that feeling, and my favorite thing, is mysterious rooms. Rooms that aren't in the blueprints. Rooms that can't possibly "fit" where they are located. Rooms that are accessed through hidden doors. Rooms that are weird shapes. And especially when any of those qualities change. Rooms that are there one moment and not the next.

This book has that in spades.