If you’re on the hunt for a razor-sharp, atmospheric horror read to cleanse your palate, Sara Gran’s Come Closer delivers an impactful masterclass in psychological dread. Coming in at just under 200 pages, it takes many of the recognisable tropes of a demonic possession tale and strips back the theatrical jump scares, replacing them with something far more insidious: absolute, quiet inevitability. After some dense literary reads, I was firmly up for something fun, breezy, and deliciously unsettling. How did Gran’s novel stack up? Join us at What We Reading for our Come Closer book review to find out!
Date Published: 2003
Author: Sara Gram
Genre: Horror, Thriller
Pages: 194
Goodreads Rating: 3.64/5
Come Closer 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 is 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. Is she possessed by a demon, or is she just going insane?
What Worked
Off the bat, I love the way Sara Gran utilises a concise, matter-of-fact delivery throughout Come Closer. Even as Amanda’s actions become more and more erratic and her grip on reality starts to slip, she charts the increasingly deranged events with such a chilling finality that it starts off feeling suspenseful, but soon descends into a dread-fuelled journey where you’re always wrestling with a feeling of where the final destination is.
You’re constantly waiting for Amanda to try something drastic or do something drastic to rid herself of the demon infesting her, but these never really materialise. There’s no heroic priest or exorcism performed; it’s a descent without any breaks.
This brilliant choice genuinely adds to the feeling of helplessness and inevitability, subverting a lot of tropes associated with other demonic possession stories where the plot usually revolves around increasingly desperate attempts to purge the victim of their demon.
Come Closer is a book that revels in its dark themes, is snappy in its breadth, and is brimming with familiar possession tropes that still feel fresh and original to Gran’s story.
What Didn’t
Gran tries to make Come Closer feel like a book with some ambiguity over whether Amanda’s increasingly unhinged behaviour is the work of a demon, or an altogether more human psychological unravelling. Unfortunately, this infusion of ambiguity never really shines through the book, as it was already pretty obvious that the descent was caused by Naamah, Amanda’s demon.
The snappy pace of the book helps sell the terror and helplessness of the possession and works as an addictive one-sitting page-turner. However, the book would have also benefitted from more pages being invested in seeing the happier parts of Ed and Amanda’s relationship so we as the audience have a better sense of the stakes in play, and what she stands to lose as it all begins to fall apart.
We could have lingered more on what living with the demon must have actually felt like, particularly when the realisation dawns on Amanda that she is being taken over and losing control of her life. There are a lot of big time jumps which, when coupled with the matter-of-fact delivery the book is told through, do lead to a sort of emotional detachment from the reader from Amanda.
Verdict
The biggest gripe I have with Come Closer is that I probably wanted a bit more of it. On one hand, the short page count works a lot in its favour, but I can’t help but feel that a more fleshed-out work that properly showed Amanda’s life and her subsequent emotional unravelling as the psychological dread set in would have taken this tale to another level.
Overall though, Come Closer is a deeply fun, addictive possession story that thrives on its atmospheric, psychological, and stripped-back tone. Amanda’s matter-of-fact narration provides the novel with an eerie feeling of detachment and inevitability that helps sell the bleak tone even further, and the snappy pace makes this a compelling, one-sitting page-turner that breathes fresh life into one of horror’s most well-worn tropes.
Our Rating: 4/5
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Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
