Written by Sara Gran
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
“We could devote our lives to making sense of the odd, the inexplicable, the coincidental, but most of us don’t. And neither did I.”
Imagine you’ve spent weeks working on a project for work and when you turn it into your boss, he reads your proposal and the second line says that he “eats shit and likes it”…but you didn’t write that (though you may think it’s true). That uncomfortable day at the office is where we meet architect Amanda in Sara Gran’s 2003 novel, Come Closer. Following that incident, Amanda and her husband Ed begin to hear strange sounds in their loft apartment, located in a sparsely populated area of town. The tap-tap-tap- tap echoes throughout the loft but is strongest when Amanda is alone.
One night, Amanda sees a woman in her dream who “was beautiful and had dark eyes, her only flaw was her huge head of black hair, which was matted into dirty locks…her teeth were as pointy as fangs.” The woman introduces herself to Amanda as Naamah. As days pass, in addition the hearing the tapping, Amanda begins to exhibit out of character behavior: she takes up smoking again, shoplifts, picks fights with Ed, and she continues to see Naamah, but now it is not only in her dreams.
When a package with a design book she had ordered for work arrives, she discovers that instead of “Design Issues Past and Present” she has received a book called “Demon Possession Past and Present”. Amused, Amanda takes a quiz in the book designed to tell the reader if they are possessed by a demon. Her results, “3-6: You may be haunted, or in the early stages of possession. Do not be alarmed. Seek a spiritual counselor for assistance.”
Amanda does seek spiritual counsel from Sister Maria, but after a beach vacation with Ed that results in an incident that assures Amanda Sister Maria’s potions to combat possession aren’t working, she consults a psychiatrist. But is the doctor working to help her? Is this really a demonic possession or is Amanda slowly losing her grip on reality?
As Amanda’s score on the demonic possession quiz continues to increase, Come Closer builds to its horrific and bloody ending.
Read this book at night, alone in your apartment and try to ignore the tapping…
Sara Gran is also the author of the acclaimed Claire DeWitt mysteries and the series’ 3rd book The Infinite Blacktop is being released in September 2018. You can find out more about her at www.worldsbestdetective.com
Come Closer is available to order on Amazon.
- Mass Market Paperback:224 pages
- Publisher:Berkley (July 3, 2007)
- ISBN-10:0425216470