The Grip of It by Jac Jemc

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


After finishing this novel, I felt very much like the main characters did for the majority of the book - unsettled and unsure of what the literal hell just occurred. Seriously - what am I supposed to make of this? This is either a beautifully written, honest and eerie gem of modern literature, or it’s a messy hodgepodge of haunted stuff and marital problems and insanity thrown into one story. Or - wait for it - maybe it’s all of the above. And maybe that is why after a few hours of marinating on it (and reading close to a hundred other reviews and “ ‘The Grip Of It’ explained” threads....), I’ve decided that’s more than likely what the author was going for.

Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way: the ending is completely ambiguous and one hundred percent open to interpretation, which many people despise. You get zero explanations. Well, let me rephrase that, you actually get MULTIPLE explanations. This novel could work as one of those Choose Your Own Ending! books from the 90s. “If you think the house is really haunted, flip to page 96. If you think Julie and James are descending into madness and paranoia caused by deeply rooted issues in their marriage, turn to page 65. If you think the doctors were right and Julie is just suffering from effects of the rye ergot fungus combined with epilepsy, skip to page 102.” Really. These are just some of the possible causes for the chaos and haunting these characters encounter.

If you’re the type of person who can accept and move past that, you can appreciate the novel for what it does best, which is forcing you to confront the spine tingling fact that there is no one universal truth, and everything we do, say, hear, see, think and feel is based on our mind’s perception of what we deem as “real”. There is no definite right or wrong analysis for anything, and every situation has the ability to have multiple explanations. The human mind is a powerful thing and we believe what we want to believe because it’s what suits us at that time. And everyone we encounter is doing the same thing. And THAT, if you ask me, is actually the scariest concept to grasp.

I will never know if the house was really haunted or if Rolf was to blame (was he even “real”?!) or if it was all mental illness caused by mold growing in the old house, or if it was just a metaphor for Julie and Jame’s troubled marriage, the ugliness of their secrets manifesting into a perceived “haunting”. And maybe the author didn’t know either. I guess I will have to choose to rationalize the events of this novel however I see fit until I decide something else makes more sense, and I’m okay with that.





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