Spoiler-free
After finishing The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephan Graham Jones, which I found too dense and heavy for right now, I was in dire need of something light and fun. Play Nice by Rachel Harrison was exactly that! There’s nothing ground-breaking here, or anything particularly unique or original, it’s simply a good campy time! This is the first book from Rachel Harrison I have read and for sure won’t be the last. I can see her becoming a nice palette cleanser author within the horror genre for whenever I’m just wanting something quick and easy between darker books.
The Premise
This is a haunted house novel, and is exactly what you’d expect it to be. It doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel but simply delivers a solid story bound to be a good time. We follow Clio, who is some sort of fashion influencer. After her mother dies, she attempts to fix up her childhood home, which just so happens to be haunted. Only this isn’t the first time she knew about this. Her father, two sisters and just about everyone else try to discourage her from even entering the house, but Clio doesn’t listen and sees it as a good opportunity for house flipping content. Besides, this isn’t her first encounter with the demon on 6 Edgewood Drive. Heck, her mum has written an entire book about it.
The Review
If this premise sounds generic to you, that’s because it is. It didn’t bother me, as I devour these types of stories in whatever capacity and this was a solid one. What I enjoyed about this book was the emphasis on family dynamics. Clio’s relationship with her family is rocky at best, but you can tell there is a lot of love there. Her dad is always there for her in her every need and despite the messy divorce that shocked the family, you can tell that their bond is still strong and he cares for her deeply. The relationship dynamic between Clio and her sisters - Leda and Daphne - felt very realistic to me and it’s very evident that the trauma their mother left them is potent, particularly after her death. Clio is the youngest of the three and memories of her past are hazy. It’s quickly insinuated that perhaps something much darker and sinister has happened in her past, when she lived on 6 Edgewood Drive (post-divorce) with her mother and 2 sisters, who won’t tell her anything. Perhaps it’s time she finally read her mother’s book she promised her family not to read…
This book is camp! It doesn’t take itself too seriously and I love it for that. The humour is very sassy. Honestly, Clio is kind of a brat, but I found her behaviour to be quite funny and unpredictable. She is constantly going against what her family is saying and sometimes it is just for the sake of pissing them off.
“She didn’t try. She left us,” I say, catching myself off guard. I sound bratty and resentful, which is weird, because I swear I’m only one of those things.
If I were to come across her in real life, I don’t know what I’d think of her, she’d probably be pretty insufferable. However, to read about her in a haunted house novel? Hell yeah, give me them snarky remarks.
He pulls out onto the street. “Tears can be cathartic.” “I find they mostly just ruin my make up,” I say, cracking my window.
The actual horror moments are pretty generic for the haunted house sub genre. Expect a lot of lights flickering on and off, messages written in notebooks and cupboard doors frantically swinging open and closed. You know the drill… These moments were just about effective enough to build up the suspense and to remind Clio that the threat of this demon is very much real, and not just delusions of trauma, as everyone will have her believe. Nothing crazy here, or particularly out there, it’s all fairly tame. As I said before, this book definitely focuses a lot on family dynamics as opposed to the horrors of the house itself.
As touched on earlier, Clio’s mother has a published book about the haunted house, and as inexplicable things start to occur when Clio is renovating the house, she decides to secretly read it. She finds an annotated copy from her dead mother and secrets of her past are slowly revealed. We also get to read through the book alongside Clio and it becomes difficult to decipher reality from fiction. In Clio’s mother’s annotations she even states how certain aspects of the book were embellished to get a publishing deal. Clio must therefore rely on her fractured memories of her time in the house to help deal with her current confrontations with the demon.
The writing is very easy to read and digestible, which is exactly what I was after. You could really fly through this book without too much thought and just have a nice weekend. I really enjoyed this one and I look forward to reading more books by Rachel Harrison, perhaps Black Sheep or So Thirsty next.
🌕🌕🌕🌖🌑 3.75 stars
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