Jac Jemc's House Might Be Haunted
There's no need to beat around the bush on this one. The Grip of It is a hot little firecracker of a novel that completely ruined an entire workday and night's sleep as I snuck in chapters between answering emails and stayed awake past my bedtime trying to figure it out. Advertised as a horror novel, specifically of the haunted house variety, it delivers on that promise, but in the distinctly 21st century sense that asks--and never answers--whether the haunting is inside the house or only inside your brain. It's easier to look your friends in the eyes when you're arguing that ghosts are hallucinations brought on by stress or ultrasound or genetic predispositions than to say you actually believe in them as the unresolved images of the unsatisfied dead. Our cultural fascination with the terrifying and the outre shines light upon the unpleasant truth; we still fear madness, no matter its source, and we recognize parts of our own minds as being as unpredictable and uncontrollable as the ghosts of generations past.
Jac Jemc dances deftly down the tightrope of narrative, offering suggestions here and there that the wife is to blame, or the husband, or the creepy neighbor, or some malevolent force deep within the young couple's new home. The reader sees the story through the protagonists' eyes, and we are limited by their limitations and troubled by the same unanswered questions that trouble the characters. The book fires off concise chapters like slugs from a gun; they waste no energy on actions extraneous to their ultimate objective and they punch above their fighting weight. In many cases, the reader doesn't actually know whose eyes Jenc is writing through until an easy pronoun clarifies the narrator's gender. In a book with so few answers, however, and where the characters' questions and identities only seem to multiply, it may not matter who is telling which part of the story. Both characters appear to be under the influence of the same malaise, whether paranormal or psychogenic, and the edges between them and their environment blur to a point where they cannot tell reality from fiction. The reader's conundrum of finding the protagonists' voices to be indistinguishable is only an extension of that featureless horror.
My only complaint with Jenc's work is that the ambiguity that characterizes--and causes--the suspense throughout remains entirely unresolved. There is true terror in the prospect of losing the ability to distinguish between reality and imagination, and by leaving the reader unsure of what they have just experienced, Jenc prolongs that terror beyond the last of the book's too-few pages. But the same part of my brain that prefers cookies to Brussels sprouts and Game of Thrones to The Lord of the Rings wishes for some closure, no matter how slight. On the other hand, life itself resists the human impulse for closure and resolution, forcing us to come to terms with dangling hopes and unquenched questions. If life refuses to deliver on these demands, it might be unfair to ask those things of this book. But boy, how I want to stand up and demand answers, if for no reason other than to sleep better tonight.
