Book Review: "Come Closer" by Sara Gran

I have read quite a few horror novels in my time, especially the contemporary kind. I enjoy reading contemporary horror because of its ability to fuse itself with very real life situations, making us question the legitimacy of the entity involved. For example: in “The Dangers of Smoking in Bed” by Mariana Enriquez we have a story about two women who fall in love with the same man, but he goes for a different woman. What ensues afterwards involves something that feels almost supernatural in behaviour, but can be explained through the real world as well. A tragic ending shows us a few things too - it can be well written (as in the Mariana Enriquez story) so that we can blame it on both ‘worlds’ but it can also come into question of whether it actually happened or a character is simply fantasising its happening. When the mind of the characters change, we tend to blend the two ‘worlds’ involved together and therefore, we cannot know whether the event takes place in the real world, or in their now infected state of mind. It is something I have always loved about contemporary horror and if you want to learn more about how the mind of the character becomes infected with obsession, then I would look at the seminal text for this - Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House”.

Sara Gran’s “Come Closer” is about a women named Amanda who lives with her husband, Edward. Amanda works as an architect and one day, she lands a strange copy of a proposal on her boss’s desk and swears that it is not her actual proposal and someone’s playing a trick on her. After having a strange dream of a childhood imaginary friend that she conjured up because her mother died when she was a child, she relives past traumas in order to deal with this new founded memory. Piece by piece, she realises that this may not be the imaginary friend she had as a child, instead it may be something much worse. Inside her house, tapping is starting to form like an animal running around her bathroom. She starts to shoplift lipstick and picks fights with her husband - arguing with him almost all of the time. Amanda does not know yet what is happening, but she will find out in blood and violence and malevolence. She will eventually find out that maybe this is not actually the imaginary friend that she had in childhood. Maybe this is not her at all.

Written in first person with incredible amounts of style, this contemporary horror novel may be short, but it really does the job in terms of story and characters. Each chapter is short, cut off from description and so, the reader imagines what it is like in their head and can only come up with the worst case scenarios. A brilliantly terrifying novel that is tense and foreboding, this horror text is laden with thrilling moments of change, horrific incidents and is tainted with the evil of black comedy.

One of the best books I have read all year, Sara Gran makes a perfect case for her book to be considered a timeless classic of flash horror. It is an amazing exploration of the psychological notions of change, movement and growing up. With themes of dissatisfaction and lustre, lucidity and intensity, Sara Gran charges the imagination with all the possibilities of what could happen and then, what actually happens is something far, far worse. A horror novel that will have you constantly looking over your shoulder and leave you in a state of shock - it will make you question whether any of it really happened at all.