Rating: 
Summary: Creepy and wonderful
Review: After reading Sara Gran's excellent "Saturn's Return to New York" I couldn't wait to read her latest, "Come Closer." I expected to love it, and I was not disappointed. Her spare style sets the perfect tone for this grown-up ghost story of a modern woman who just might be possessed. The story was absorbing, gripping -- and creepy: although I read it enthusiastically, this was definitely a book I had to put away after dark. Wonderful!
Rating:
Summary: The demon within
Review: An aura of menace gathers around narrator Amanda as strange mood swings and irritating tapping-thumping noises in the walls begin to disrupt her happily married life. Small things gather momentum. She begins fighting with her husband, resumes smoking, goes out drinking after work. The imaginary playmate from her childhood returns. It's quite some time before she realizes the seductive, insistent third voice inside her head (after the initial voice of temptation, and after the sober rejoinder of the voice of reason and resistance) isn`t her own. Or is it?
Gran's ("Saturn's Return to New York") short novel is a fairly straightforward tale of demonic possession, made chillingly delicious by the spare, unadorned voice, quick pace, and subtleties of psychological desire. Amanda's fate is not inevitable; there are ways to counter the demon, but does she have the faith required, or the strength of mind? Does she perhaps prefer to give in? Thoughtful as well as scary, Gran's tale evokes the lonely fears of adulthood.
Rating:
Summary: a haunting, masterful ride
Review: Come Closer By Sara Gran
Soho Press, 2003
Reviewed By Felicia C. Sullivan
Freud believed that "unheimlich" or the uncanny is a much more fertile province in fiction than in real life, for it contains the whole of the latter and something more besides, something that cannot be found in real life. The contrast between what has been repressed and what has been surmounted cannot be transposed on to the uncanny in fiction without profound modification; for the realm of fantasy depends for its effect on the fact that its content is not submitted to reality-testing. The supernatural, albeit concepts of telekinesis, black magic, migration, and demonic possession, is this elusive and intriguing goddess, because it provides one that leads a hum-drum life with the possibility of something other.
Sara Gran's second effort, Come Closer, is a spare and haunting story that migrates the reader from the definitive world of which we are comfortably familiar to a very different world dominated by a lascivious demon, Naamah, known by the Kabbalah as an evil spirit that has "a lust for life and a taste for violence" that assumes the body and mind of a young architect, Amanda. The central figure is a woman that lives a quiet life with her husband and her only thrill is the affections of a stray shepherd that lurks in her empty neighborhood.
The story opens with an odd tapping that only occurs in Amanda's presence. Unable to locate the origin of the sound, she & her husband assume it's mice in the walls, a building abnormality. And so it goes. Soon thereafter, she mistakenly receives a book in the mail entitled, Demon Possession Past and Present and she receives visits in her dreams by a warm figure that was a childhood imaginary friend. They lay in sanguine sand, warmed and Amanda is filled with comfort and release. The dreams increase with fervor and soon Naamah is a voice teetering on her earlobe, eager to envelope Amanda, to create her anew. Slowly, things begin to change. Amanda burns her husband, accidentally, a black-out reveals that she has committed a slashing of a newsstand seller and a colleague and she repeatedly finds herself in bars donning sexy heels and painted lips, seducing men. Throughout the transformation, Gran effectively balances the psychological with the supernatural. Naamah is Amanda's id, delivering the freedom that she would otherwise never have. But a part of her intercedes, always, seeking to right things by visiting a psychiatrist, seeking a exorcism, a sliver of her ego clings while the rest of her slips away. Gran keeps the tension heightened to determine whether Amanda's life will return to normal - she'll resume her safe life with Ed, peter along at her small firm or will Naamah sustain, consume Amanda whole. The story's progression is artful, subtle and the balance of Amanda/Naamah's interior point-of-view juxtaposed with her outward face is masterful in understanding the character's psychological transformation. One feels this is New York, but not really - from the nebulous location throughout, the reader feels grounded and ungrounded at the same time. Gran in Come Closer asks us to question the things we firmly know.
The psychological and supernatural are so intricately linked in this tale, that it is eerily accessible to the reader - could the impossible be possible? What is possession? What are the limits of the pragmatic, scientific world as we know of it and how easily could it be compromised by the intangible? Sara Gran weaves a fine yarn between the two and delivers a wonderfully unpredictable ending in our predictable world.
Rating:
Summary: an uncanny, haunting ride.
Review: From page one, I felt what the Germans called "umheimlich" - a feeling of the uncanny, something other that inhabits, haunts and possesses. So was I upon entering "Come Closer". Amanda is a woman living a quiet, gray life...she likes her job, likes her life...her only excitement is the psuedo attack of a neighborhood stray dog. Slowly, she begins to seek something or someone other and so enters Nameeh, a beautiful demon that has a taste for sex, violence. She haunts Amanda's dreams ... a flood of bloodied sand, a nymph rising from a red ocean. After sexual escapades, blackouts, murders, exorcisms, Amanda fades into the background and Nameeh has assumed her. With swift prose, Gran never wavers, her narrator is never compromised, reduced and the pacing is perfect from page to page.
Rating:
Summary: an uncanny, haunting ride.
Review: From page one, I felt what the Germans called "umheimlich" - a feeling of the uncanny, something other that inhabits, haunts and possesses. So was I upon entering "Come Closer". Amanda is a woman living a quiet, gray life...she likes her job, likes her life...her only excitement is the psuedo attack of a neighborhood stray dog. Slowly, she begins to seek something or someone other and so enters Nameeh, a beautiful demon that has a taste for sex, violence. She haunts Amanda's dreams ... a flood of bloodied sand, a nymph rising from a red ocean. After sexual escapades, blackouts, murders, exorcisms, Amanda fades into the background and Nameeh has assumed her. With swift prose, Gran never wavers, her narrator is never compromised, reduced and the pacing is perfect from page to page.
Rating:
Summary: Truely scary
Review: I thought this was an awesome book. I too wish, that there were more good reads like this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Spooky, quick read, open end?
Review: If you like your novels short and spooky, Come Closer is for you. Told in a rather unique style, the story unfolds quickly, but falls short of opening up completely. I was left feeling a bit dissapointed that some of the secondary characters were left in the middle of the book (seeming to be part of a maniacal plot) never to be seen or heard from again. However, you will arrive at the end of the tale feeling...well...just plain creeped out. The mark of a true horror story.
Rating:
Summary: Spooky, quick read, open end?
Review: If you like your novels short and spooky, Come Closer is for you. Told in a rather unique style, the story unfolds quickly, but falls short of opening up completely. I was left feeling a bit dissapointed that some of the secondary characters were left in the middle of the book (seeming to be part of a maniacal plot) never to be seen or heard from again. However, you will arrive at the end of the tale feeling...well...just plain creeped out. The mark of a true horror story.
Rating:
Summary: Why can't there be more like this?
Review: It only seems to happen twice a year for me. I pick up a book that pulls me into another world from the first word and keeps me there until the end. This was one of them - the first in a long time.Come closer manages to affect you, even scare you from very early on even though it is written more precisely and to the point than most novels. The chapters are sometimes only one and a half pages. There are no lengthy descriptions of setting or character development. It doesn't matter - you don't miss them. The author manages to pull you in in her own way. My only nitpick is that (spoiler alert!!!) you almost don't feel the main character has much reason to fight the demon. Her life doesn't seem perfect nor does she seem happy as the back cover describes. Her husband seems absent and clinical and the area they live in depressing. I could have missed some deeper meaning here though. A damn good book.
Rating:
Summary: unnerving. haunting.
Review: omigod.
Sara Gran knows how to hook you the reader, play you, and then reel you in. Excellent pacing. Well drawn characters. Not a lot of graphic description of blood and gore, which I think is good as it leaves the, er, fleshing out of such scenes to the reader's imagination. (Love it when a writer doesn't feel they have to spell out *everything* to the reader.) And a truely chilling ending.
I read *a lot*, and it's a rare book that I pick up and find I cannot put down until I finish it. This was one. Fortunately it doesn't take long. Read it in a few hours. The whole time thinking, "oh no. oh, no. nooooooo." And that was a couple weeks ago and the danged thing is *still* haunting me!
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