The Grip of It: A Novel
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
Finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Fiction Award, Dan Chaon's Best of 2017 pick in Publishers Weekly, one of Vol. 1 Brooklyn's Best Books of 2017, a BOMB Magazine "Looking Back on 2017: Literature" Pick, and one of Vulture's 10 Best Thriller Books of 2017.
Jac Jemc's The Grip of It is a chilling literary horror novel about a young couple haunted by their newly purchased home
Touring their prospective suburban home, Julie and James are stopped by a noise. Deep and vibrating, like throat singing. Ancient, husky, and rasping, but underwater. "That's just the house settling," the real estate agent assures them with a smile. He is wrong.
The move—prompted by James's penchant for gambling and his general inability to keep his impulses in check—is quick and seamless; both Julie and James are happy to start afresh. But this house, which sits between a lake and a forest, has its own plans for the unsuspecting couple. As Julie and James try to establish a sense of normalcy, the home and its surrounding terrain become the locus of increasingly strange happenings. The framework— 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 painful, grisly bruises.
Like the house that torments the troubled married couple living within its walls, The Grip of It oozes with palpable terror and skin-prickling dread. Its architect, Jac Jemc, meticulously traces Julie and James's unsettling journey through the depths of their new home as they fight to free themselves from its crushing grip.
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Jac Jemc. (2017). The Grip of It: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Jac Jemc. 2017. The Grip of It: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Jac Jemc, The Grip of It: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
MLA Citation (style guide)Jac Jemc. The Grip of It: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
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- bioText: Jac Jemc is the author of False Bingo, The Grip of It, My Only Wife, and A Different Bed Every Time. My Only Wife was a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award, and her story collection False Bingo won the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, was a Lambda Award finalist, and was long-listed for the Story Prize. Jemc currently teaches creative writing at the University of California San Diego.
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Finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Fiction Award, Dan Chaon's Best of 2017 pick in Publishers Weekly, one of Vol. 1 Brooklyn's Best Books of 2017, a BOMB Magazine "Looking Back on 2017: Literature" Pick, and one of Vulture's 10 Best Thriller Books of 2017.
Jac Jemc's The Grip of It is a chilling literary horror novel about a young couple haunted by their newly purchased home
Touring their prospective suburban home, Julie and James are stopped by a noise. Deep and vibrating, like throat singing. Ancient, husky, and rasping, but underwater. "That's just the house settling," the real estate agent assures them with a smile. He is wrong.
The move—prompted by James's penchant for gambling and his general inability to keep his impulses in check—is quick and seamless; both Julie and James are happy to start afresh. But this house, which sits between a lake and a forest, has its own plans for the unsuspecting couple. As Julie and James try to establish a sense of normalcy, the home and its surrounding terrain become the locus of increasingly strange happenings. The framework— 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 painful, grisly bruises.
Like the house that torments the troubled married couple living within its walls, The Grip of It oozes with palpable terror and skin-prickling dread. Its architect, Jac Jemc, meticulously traces Julie and James's unsettling journey through the depths of their new home as they fight to free themselves from its crushing grip.- reviews
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- source: Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune
- content: "A page-turning psychological thriller . . . [The Grip of It] is the clever work of a writer who has patiently carved out her own home in contemporary fiction . . . as chilling as it is evocative."
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- source: Matt Lewis, Electric Literature
- content: "[The Grip of It] is a cerebral haunting in book form, a page-turning, suspenseful read that will stay with you long after you've finished it . . . The Grip of It stalks the reader through its pages with a silent, grayscale terror, like the brush of a web against your cheek in the dark . . . What makes this novel so powerful is the acknowledgement that intimacy does require a trust beyond logic, that "ruin" can come just as easily to the guilty or the guiltless, and an embrace of the chaos is sometimes the only way to make it out to the other side."
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- source: Duncan Barlow, Vol. 1 Brooklyn
- content: "Jemc adds something unique to [horror in American media] with her writing . . . To keep the tension going, Jemc never allows her readers a chance to fully know if the haunting is authentic, but it's not validation of the supernatural that the reader needs to enjoy this book. The pleasure of this text is in the participation of the reader, the act of taking Jemc's narrative gaps and her characters' fugue states and constructing the story they want (or don't want)."
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Starred review from June 5, 2017
The latest from Jemc (A Different Bed Every Time) is a haunted house tale that toys with the hallmarks of ghost stories—a young city couple moving to a small town, a curmudgeonly neighbor, a spooky legend—to create an exhilarating and unsettling literary page-turner. After settling into their new home, James and Julie discover it is riddled with secret rooms and passageways. Soon thereafter, drawings appear on a bedroom wall, noises keep them up at night, and bruises appear on Julie’s body. Despite their efforts, they can’t get in touch with their realtor, who has vanished from existence, and the woods that line their backyard—full of children playing in the treetops—appear closer to their house each day. A local bartender tells James about the troubled family who previously owned the house, and while snooping around the neighboring home of a secretive old man, the couple discovers a life filled with tragedy and premature death. From here, Jemc settles comfortably into the couple’s increasingly paranoid and disturbed thoughts. Short chapters bounce between James’s and Julie’s perspectives, and as the author ratchets up the tension, the reader eagerly follows. The conclusion is the perfect cap to a story full of genuine frights.
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July 1, 2017
As reward for our labors, we expect home to provide sanctuary, comfort, and familiarity. Despite ambiguous town chatter regarding the strange, apparently tragic history of their new home, James and Julie settle in, concerned only by elderly neighbor Rolf's voyeurism. Day by day, though, the house consumes their attention and nerves: odd-sized "secret spaces"--as difficult to enter as exit--are discovered. Molds and stains appear at once patterned and discontinuous. A sporadic humming tone, not always heard by both, is unfindable. Are the woods growing closer or receding? Is someone getting into the house and moving things around? Even the clock can't be trusted, with bizarre dilations and compressions of time. The marriage, previously troubled by James's gambling, suffers, but the couple vow solidarity. The second-person point of view charges the narrative with jagged energy, and in the end, we learn that people are more haunted than any house. Jemc (My Only Wife; A Different Bed Every Time) reconfigures the haunted-house story to reflect current anxieties and their violation of formerly intimate spaces and relationships. VERDICT For connoisseurs of the "new weird" and literary/psychological horror a la Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and Marisha Pessl's Night Film. [See Prepub Alert, 2/20/17.]--William Grabowski, McMechen, WV
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Fiction Award, Dan Chaon's Best of 2017 pick in Publishers Weekly, one of Vol. 1 Brooklyn's Best Books of 2017, a BOMB Magazine "Looking Back on 2017: Literature" Pick, and one of Vulture's 10 Best Thriller Books of 2017.
Jac Jemc's The Grip of It is a chilling literary horror novel about a young couple haunted by their newly purchased home
Touring their prospective suburban home, Julie and James are stopped by a noise. Deep and vibrating, like throat singing. Ancient, husky, and rasping, but underwater. "That's just the house settling," the real estate agent assures them with a smile. He is wrong.
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