The avoidance is rarely for nefarious reasons, of course. They wait, looming in the background, for their appointed time. You choose to wait on them instead of picking them up when they’re first recommended to you, or when you first hear about them online, or when you first flip open a copy at the bookstore. Just as in one of the novel’s own antecedents, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, it’s hard to say which is the more fearsome notion.There are some books that spend a long time making their way onto your to-read shelf. What makes Come Closer so magnetically disturbing is the way in which, even as Gran tells a knowing fable of diabolic possession, she leaves open the possibility that the demon – pert of nose and slender of foot – might emanate from Amanda’s repressed psyche. “Everyone has thoughts like this from time to time,” she comforts herself, not quite registering just how many unexplained late nights he’s been spending at the office. A life that epitomises personal and professional bliss, yet leaves her wanting to grind a cigarette butt into Ed’s bare leg. Throughout, there remains that sly, barely perceptible delight in the wrecking of a life so carefully constructed. When she starts blacking out, things career gruesomely out of control. Soon come dive bars, shopping sprees, hook-ups with strange men. A tapping noise fills the home she shares with husband Ed a shoplifted lipstick finds its way into her bag she begins smoking again. The incident is followed by other unexplained, out-of-character happenings. Because horrified though she is, Amanda can’t help agreeing with what’s been written about her boss. While that feeling of profound instability propels the novel, it’s accompanied by another: exhilaration.
There was no logic, no reason any more,” she explains. “I felt like I had stepped into a bad dream. On his desk sits her proposal for a renovation, but when he thrusts it at her, she finds her words have been replaced by an expletive-laden rant about him. It begins on a Friday afternoon, when narrator Amanda, an architect, is summoned by her boss. When she starts blacking out, things career gruesomely out of control The compromises and contortions required to succeed as a woman, however, haven’t aged a bit. Newly reissued, her lean, seductively mean novel Come Closer evokes a turn-of-the-millennium world in which thirtysomethings could still afford urban lofts and mobile phones hadn’t become ubiquitous. In the past couple of years, novelists such as Daisy Johnson, Megan Hunter and Helen Phillips have harnessed them to probe female passions and frustrations, but Sara Gran beat them to it in 2003. Harpies, doppelgangers, possessive spirits: once confined to horror writing, these supernatural entities prowl the pages of literary fiction with increasing confidence.
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