If your October reading leans toward spooky tales, there’s a new novel by Rachel Harrison you might want to check out.
Harrison has become synonymous with contemporary horror, with previous novels such as So Thirsty, Such Sharp Teeth and Cackle. So she’s covered vampires, werewolves and witches, and this time she’s turning her attention to the ghosts of childhood trauma.
Talk about scary.
Play Nice centers on Clio Barnes, a twenty-something stylist and influencer whose picture-perfect exterior hides an ugly past. Clio and her two older sisters grew up in a haunted house. After their estranged mother, Alexandra, dies unexpectedly — as characters in horror novels so often do — she leaves the house on Edgewood Drive to her three daughters. The two older girls want nothing to do with their childhood home, but Clio envisions flipping it for profit and a whole lot of online content.
“The chance to make something pretty, curate an aesthetic,” Clio says. “I get to take the setting of the worst time in my family history and transform it into something else, make it unrecognizable. … It’s the next best thing to burning it to the ground.”
What Clio remembers is her parents’ messy divorce. Her mother moved Clio and her sisters into a house occupied by a demon — or so Alex claimed — and the courts later stripped Alex of custody after she went off the deep end.
As the home makeover process begins, though, Clio begins to wonder if there might be some truth to her mother’s scary stories. One of the first bits of evidence is a tattered and annotated copy of Alex’s book, The Demon of Edgewood Drive, which appears in Clio’s old bedroom. Thus begins the book-within-a-book portions of Play Nice, which Harrison uses to add crucial bits of backstory and other family members’ perspectives.
“How do you prepare your daughter for the world?” Alex muses in her book. “Do you tell them every ugly truth so that they understand, so that they know what to expect? Or, do you fill their heads with dreams and hope for the best?”
Play Nice is part horror novel, part dysfunctional family drama, part contemporary romance — with a spicy little subplot involving the all-grown-up boy next door. As a main character, Clio comes off as spoiled and selfish, but also damaged and vulnerable, and she has the courage to face her fears. Harrison’s writing exudes slow-burning dread, with just enough creepy scenes to keep the novel moving at a steady pace, and the ultimate climax is surprising and satisfying.
It’s a haunted house story with a healthy dose of humanity, and family dynamics that feel raw and real. A perfect October read.
