Rating: 
Summary: A Wild Ride
Review: Sara Gran gives the going-over-the-edge book a whole new spin and it starts with a book! Amanda orders a book by mail (I wonder who from?) and the wrong book comes: one about demonic possession, with a quiz, yet. She doesn't send it back; in fact, some of what it says seems applicable to her own life. Everything around her starts changing, and her attitudes to her home, her husband, her job all deteriorate. Or is she actually liberated? That's the intriguing question in a thoughtful, hard-to-put down chiller.Lev Raphael...
Rating:
Summary: A Wild Ride
Review: Sara Gran gives the going-over-the-edge book a whole new spin and it starts with a book! Amanda orders a book by mail (I wonder who from?) and the wrong book comes: one about demonic possession, with a quiz, yet. She doesn't send it back; in fact, some of what it says seems applicable to her own life. Everything around her starts changing, and her attitudes to her home, her husband, her job all deteriorate. Or is she actually liberated? That's the intriguing question in a thoughtful, hard-to-put down chiller. Lev Raphael...
Rating: 
Summary: A parable of female power
Review: This clever little novella can be read in one sitting, but don't let that suggest it isn't significant. It has the intensity of a parable, and that's probably the best way to describe it, given the subtext. Ostensibly this is a story about a case of demonic possession, but Sara Gran uses that as an analogy for the psychological crisis of Amanda - an intelligent, thirty-something, professional woman trapped in a too-safe relationship that has drained her life of meaning. The demon apparently possessing her is Naamah - Adam's second wife, in Jewish folklore, and the woman he rejected because he saw her being created by God, i.e. he saw the human blood and guts beneath the feminine beauty. Forced to confront a real human being rather than a submissive sexual object, Adam refused her and she fled to the Red Sea. (A story hidden in documents only accessible to older Jewish men, of course!) As Naamah wheedles her way into Amanda's consciousness through blood-soaked dreams and nagging voices, and slowly starts to take control of her life, the subtext emerges: Gran's story can be read as an exploration of the fear felt by both women and men about female power and the surprising incapacity of modern life to allow women appropriate avenues for its expression, especially as they grow older. It also confirms the way religious/mythical stories grow out of the real and predictable crises of adult human life. But don't worry - this doesn't read like some kind of feminist psycho-babble. The subtext isn't worn on the sleeve. Gran focuses on the visceral as she carefully unwinds her tale with all the skill of an accomplished high-end horror writer, but with quite a bit more economy and flair. It's a testament to her narrative power that in the questionnaire entitled "Are YOU Possessed by a Demon?" she can lay out, several times, the chilling logic of escalating violence by which the story will proceed, without actually undermining the horror of those events when inevitably they come to pass. The key is the bluntness of the narrative voice. Every step is executed with a dispassionate distance that makes it more chilling, more credible, more real. This is a highly recommended novella that rewards re-reading.
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