Possession

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Devoured another Sara Gran book last night in one fell swoop--Come Closer. It feels almost rude to the author to read her book in one evening--really in the span of maybe 90 minutes. It was obviously a page turner and the writing was crisp and fast-paced, but still--the writer labors over her work for months and months and then the reader eats it up like a Butterfinger candy bar in one sitting. This one was about a woman becoming possessed by a demon, all set in modern day, the tone very matter of fact, but again, dark, dark, dark, and again, it didn't end well. I didn't find it to be particularly scary, but it was upsetting overall and I will never trust this writer to give me a hopeful ending. It did kind of make sense on another level; like if you watch as much Dateline with Lesley Stahl as I do--in those shows, you always have this seemingly ordinary family (and they always have these Sears-generated family portrait photos of everyone hanging out by a fake tree in matching denim to prove how suburban and normal they are), and then you'll discover that the dad who works at Best Buy is accused of murdering his wife and their three children, or that the wife hired a thug to shoot her husband in the parking garage, or that the middle child supposedly set fire to the house in the middle of the night. Then you wonder, how did this happen? How can these regular people who walk around and do regular things suddenly become murderers and arsonists? Gran's book has an answer for that in a way. Near the end, Amanda, the character who is slowly becoming possessed, starts to see that all around her are other people who have similarly been taken over by a demon--every once in a while, one of them will reveal its true face, eyes peeling back in the head, mouth become an unhinged black hole, and she'll realize that they are other ordinary people around her who are vessels for these evil spirits.

I think I'm done with her for a while, unless I can get my hands on her newest Claire de Witt detective novel. Apparently, I am possessed with the desire to read everything she writes, even though it leaves a slightly ashy taste in my mouth.

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