words in scarlet ink

Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It was a psychological thriller/horror book that was favorably compared to the likes of The Haunting of Hill House and that’s mostly why I picked it. It wasn’t a bad book, exactly, it just…wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be, I guess.

Julie and James are a young married couple who move into a house “between the forest and the ocean” because they need to get away from the city where they lived. James is basically a gambling addict and unable to control himself, so they leave to “start over” in the country with no money. As someone raised on the east coast of the United States for my whole life, I LOL’d at this. Where did you get a house by the ocean you can afford with no money, exactly? Please let me know, I’d like to move there.

Anyway, after they move in, the weirdness cranks up. The cute (if old and in need of some cosmetic work) house they bought seems to start rotting from the inside out, with strange stains appearing on the walls and the water inexplicably contaminated with filth. I will say that Jemc does a good job of building atmosphere here. The language is good and the house is claustrophobic and undeniably creepy. There are rooms within rooms (hello, House of Leaves) and the feeling that the house is haunted pervades throughout the novel, with hauntings happening to everyone but very much centered on the main characters. In desperately searching for the source of the house’s unexplained decay and their increasing psychological and physical torment, we end up following the couple as they get to know their weird neighbors and search for information on the house’s mysterious previous owners.

There are two places Jemc falls short here, though, and they’re fairly major flaws: the couple themselves, Julie and James, are flat, boring, and what personality they do have is rather unlikeable. This is a pretty major flaw if you’re trying to get a reader to sympathize with them. The second place this novel fails is with the resolution, in that there is none. There’s an element in many psychological horror books that leaves a lot up to the reader, but this book has literally no resolution to anything. The couple just picks up and moves out of the house. I don’t know how they managed this with no money either, but when one of the narrator’s mysterious bruising matches the weird wall stains and you never get a clue as to why, common place mysteries like “how are you buying and selling homes with no money?” take a backseat.

I’d give this book 2.5 of 5 stars, if I was using a star rating. The atmosphere and language I enjoyed, but the characters and plot fell really flat.