Midtown Reader Book Club - Jac Jemc's "The Grip of It"

October’s book of the month was selected in fitting with the eerie mood of the Halloween season – THE GRIP OF IT by Jac Jemc. Described as “A chilling literary horror novel about a young couple who purchase and live in a haunted house,” this book is guaranteed to keep you up at night reading! We’ll have THE GRIP OF IT available at 10% off leading up to Book Club. Midtown Reader’s manager, Kim Anderson, will lead October’s book club. We’ll have refreshments, great readers, and great conversation – don’t miss it!

Julie and James settle into a house in a small town outside the city where they met. The move—prompted by James’s penchant for gambling, his inability to keep his impulses in check—is quick and seamless; both Julie and James are happy to leave behind their usual haunts and start afresh. But this house, which sits between ocean and forest, has plans for the unsuspecting couple. As Julie and James try to settle into their home and their relationship, the house and its surrounding terrain become the locus of increasingly strange happenings. The architecture—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 bruises; mold spores taint the water that James pours from the sink. Together the couple embark on a panicked search for the source of their mutual torment, a journey that mires them in the history of their peculiar neighbors and the mysterious residents who lived in the house before Julia and James.

Written in creepy, potent prose, The Grip of It is an enthralling, psychologically intense novel that deals in questions of home: how we make it and how it in turn makes us, mapping itself onto bodies and the relationships we cherish.