A party girl with a dark past faces her family's literal and figurative demons in the creepy and insightful supernatural horror novel Play Nice by Rachel Harrison (Black Sheep; The Return).
Stylist and social media influencer Clio did not have a glamorous childhood. Her estranged mother, Alexandra, lost custody of Clio and her two sisters to their father in a flurry of abuse, alcoholism, and delusions. Now Alexandra has died suddenly in the vacant house where she and the girls lived, the one she insisted was possessed. Clio decides to fix up the house and sell it, "the next best thing to burning it to the ground." She finds her childhood bedroom unchanged, aside from the presence of a torn, pen-annotated copy of Alexandra's Amityville Horror-esque tell-all book. Alexandra's notes admit to creative license but insist the demon is real and that Clio's father isn't the hero he pretends to be. Then strange occurrences at the house begin to add up, and Clio wonders if her mother wasn't the most monstrous entity living on Edgewood Drive after all.
Harrison's haunted house plot combines a nostalgia for 1970s domestic horror with a dissection of a struggling woman's demonization. "The world will drive a woman insane, then point at them and laugh," Alexandra writes to Clio, underscoring a dual narrative packed with raw wounds and feminine rage that ripple through Clio's life and her relationship with her older sisters. This exploration of how stories shape trauma and the healing process is sharp, introspective, and deeply unsettling. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads