While I could not bring myself to take a break from reading this book, I needed copious amounts of wine to see myself through to the ending. That is because Sara Gran's novel Come Closer offers an evocative first-person account of a demonic possession—my personal Achilles’ heel when it comes to horror.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, ghosts are essentially harmless. Zombies are slow (unless they're RAGE infected, but I figure you'd get used to having to fight even those suckers off after a while), vampires can be dispatched with garlic and pointy wood. Demon possession is another matter. It starts off subtly enough, its symptoms innocuous or vague enough to be explained away by a plethora of alternative causes. Once any connections are made to possession, the victim is pretty much screwed.
And it's not that you've been eaten or beaten or gnawed on or had "boo" whispered in your ear. Like the weeping angels in the Doctor Who episode "Blink," human-possessing demons rob you of your life and yourself without technically killing you. Once past the point of no return, the victim is forced to share his/her body with an evil entity, watch all the hope and happiness of his/her old life slip irrevocably away, and accept the consequences of unspeakable actions committed by the entity that's decided to stake its claim on him/her.
In Gran’s novel, the first-person aspect is both refreshing and deeply moving. I face-palmed every time she rationalized or laughed off an odd occurrence that clearly spelled D-E-M-O-N to the reader. At the same time, Gran makes these occurrences intentionally banal to make the reader question all the times they've acted out of character, shrugged off an unexplained noise in their home, spotted things out of the corner of their eye that seemed to vanish as soon as they were noticed.
Gran ratchets up the gut-wrenching factor of her story by adeptly juxtaposing the narrator's genuinely sweet nature, her good intentions and love for her husband, with the awful actions she commits under the demon's influence. As the story escalates, the narrator's sense of helplessness, that her body and soul are no longer her own, that perhaps nothing can help her, evoke a heart-rending pathos to accompany the fear. As readers, we feel her life slip away from her with each chapter. Near the end, she lists many of the hopes and dreams she once carried that now seem irretrievably lost.
It left me trembling and heartbroken for the protagonist.
If you like to be genuinely disturbed, saddened, and haunted by your horror, this book should be right up your alley. For my part, Come Closer tops the list of Best Books I Never Ever Want to Read Again.
Never ever again.