The Fireside Chats

Well, I finished reading this one last night and thought I’d share. I thought this was going to be your typical haunted house novel but it was a little different. I mean, this couple move in to this new house so that they could make a new start for themselves. After they move in, they notice that weird things begin to happen. Weird things pop up around the house and the couple begin to behave different then they use to, however, it’s not the kind of things you normally see in a “haunted house story”. It’s different and I like that it’s different from the typical haunted house stories that I’ve read in the past.

I also like that they chapters weren’t long. At most, I think the longest chapter was only 2-3 pages before you come up on the next chapter. So you get everything in short bursts. And the story is told from the perspective of both the guy and the girl in the story. So, you get to hear everything from both sides in the relationship.

Synopsis: Julie and James settle into a house in a small town outside the city where they met. The move—prompted by James’s penchant for gambling, his inability to keep his impulses in check—is quick and seamless; both Julie and James are happy to leave behind their usual haunts and start afresh. But this house, which sits between ocean and forest, has plans for the unsuspecting couple. As Julie and James try to settle into their home and their relationship, the house and its surrounding terrain become the locus of increasingly strange happenings. The architecture—claustrophobic, riddled with hidden rooms within rooms—becomes unrecognizable, decaying before their eyes. Stains are animated on the wall—contracting, expanding—and map themselves onto Julie’s body in the form of bruises; mold spores taint the water that James pours from the sink. Together the couple embark on a panicked search for the source of their mutual torment, a journey that mires them in the history of their peculiar neighbors and the mysterious residents who lived in the house before Julia and James.

Written in creepy, potent prose, The Grip of It is an enthralling, psychologically intense novel that deals in questions of home: how we make it and how it in turn makes us, mapping itself onto bodies and the relationships we cherish.