Come Closer
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3.4 • 9 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Demonic possession or psychic break? One of Esquire's Top 50 horror novels of all time delves deep into the terrifying consequences of losing control.
"A perfect horror novel."—Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World
A recurrent, unidentifiable noise in her apartment. A memo to her boss that's replaced by obscene insults. Amanda—a successful architect in a happy marriage—finds her life going off kilter by degrees. She starts smoking again, and one night for no reason, without even the knowledge that she's doing it, she burns her husband with a cigarette. At night she dreams of a beautiful woman with pointed teeth on the shore of a blood-red sea.
The new voice in Amanda's head, the one that tells her to steal things and talk to strange men in bars, is strange and frightening, and Amanda struggles to wrest back control of her life. A book on demon possession suggests that the figure on the shore could be the demon Naamah, known to scholars of the Kabbalah as the second wife of Adam, who stole into his dreams and tricked him into fathering her child. Whatever the case, as the violence of her erratic behavior increases, Amanda knows that she must act to put her life right, or see it destroyed.
This new edition of the cult classic features a brand new post-script by the author and an "Are You Possessed?" questionnaire.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"What we think is impossible happens all the time," observes Amanda, the narrator of Gran's second novel (after 2001's Saturn's Return to New York), providing all the explanation advanced for this effectively understated account of her demonic possession. An industrious young architect with a promising career and seemingly happy marriage, Amanda begins acting uncharacteristically: writing obscene notes to her boss, shoplifting, committing impulsive acts of cruelty, indulging in extramarital affairs and worse. These episodes, as inexplicable as they are erratic, dovetail with sexually suggestive dreams dominated by an alluring woman who reminds Amanda of her imaginary childhood playmate. Is Amanda losing her grip? Or is Naamah, the dream woman, a demon who has sought since Amanda's infancy to take control of her? Gran keeps the reader as intriguingly uncertain as her heroine, letting Amanda relate her experience in the casual, un-self-conscious voice of someone so increasingly accepting of her outrageous behavior that she almost seems to stand outside it. This ambiguous balancing of the psychological and supernatural creates just the right amount of narrative tension to keep the reader turning pages to see if Amanda is a lost soul on the road to perdition or just a bored yuppie giving into the imp of the perverse. Gran demonstrates that an urbane and subtle approach to ideas more often treated with hysteria and flash can still produce a gripping contemporary tale of terror.
Customer Reviews
Meh
This book was more procedural than I expected. Things just kind of happen one after another. There is no mystery and very little tension. The checklist is laid out at the beginning and methodically the boxes just get ticked one after another. There isn’t a strong sense of internal struggle or any deep contemplations. It just happens. And then the climax felt underwhelming.
Pretty quick read
This was a pretty quick read. You can def finish this in 2 days. The plot was pretty interesting and the book was fast paced which I enjoyed. I would recommend this book. 3/5 stars for sure