Sarah O'Connor

“We could devote our lives to making sense of the odd, the inexplicable, the coincidental. But most of us don’t, and I didn’t either,” (Gran).

Strange things have been happening in Amanda’s life. There is a strange tapping noise in her apartment, a memo to her boss is filled with insults towards him, she’s started smoking again and burns her husband Ed, whom she loves, with a cigarette, and she’s started dreaming of a beautiful woman with sharp teeth on a red-watered beach. The woman whispers in Amanda’s head and tells her to do thing she doesn’t want to do, but is Amanda strong enough to ignore her?

I have heard such stellar things about Come Closer so imagine my huge disappointment reading this. I did go in knowing a few things: that it was a horror novel and a possession narrative, what I didn’t know is that there is no slow-burn possession here. At the start of the novel Amanda is fine to tell readers that she is possessed, that she knows who is possessing her, and regale readers in how this came to pass and how it brought her to where she is now.

With all the praise this book has gotten, I was surprised that Amanda was already possessed. Even more so, I was surprised by how little of the book is actually scary. If anything Come Closer felt like a parody of a possession narrative, some points just came off as funny. That’s not to say there were a few good creeps, but there were more moments that felt more humourous than horrifying which I can’t imagine was Gran’s intent.

I will give Gran credit that there is one thing at the end involved with the possession that I wasn’t expecting that did surprise me and that I enjoyed, and I enjoyed some of the backstory when it came to who the possessing force was. I just wish that she had continued with this path, as well as some of the vague unease that is sometimes present throughout. It was just jarring how tonally off this book was compared to how the reviews I had been reading described it.

Come Closer was not for me, but thankfully it was short. I’m on the hunt for a good possession read, but maybe I should just read The Exorcist. If you want a short read and have different tastes to me, you’ll probably love this book.

Publication: July 1 2003
Publisher: Harper Trophy
Pages: 196 pages (Libby)
Source: Library
Genre: Fiction, Horror
My Rating: ⛤⛤
Summary:

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.