Come Closer by Sara Gran
Berkley 2006
ISBN 0425210316
184 pages
saragran.com

I recently read the most unusual book and I’ve been struggling to come up with an adequate way to write about it. I hate to just say “I loved this book” and leave it at that — a review needs something more concrete to convince readers that they should pick up the title and give it a shot. But Sara Gran’s Come Closer defies all the easy genre classifications; it simply will not lend itself to a canned description. So here is where I try to write about this book I read that really impressed me. It is an old story in some ways, but utterly original in the telling. And oh yeah – it’s guaranteed to scare the crap out of you — absolutely guaranteed.

Gran lives and writes in New Orleans, but Come Closer is a New York-type novel. I couldn’t help but think that things would have turned out differently for the protagonist, Amanda, if she lived in the South, however. In New Orleans her particular problem would have been more easily believed and thus easier to “cure.” I can’t imagine that it would have ever gotten as bad as it did (and then descended to ever worse levels) if she was living in the French Quarter as opposed to a Soho stand-in. Also, in New Orleans it seems that Amanda would have learned to be a bit more on the lookout for something strange that comes her way; hell, in New Orleans she might have recognized it first thing and saved herself (and a few others) a lot of pain and suffering.

But this is a New York sort of story, so you can imagine just how wrong and weird it can get for everyone involved.

In the beginning Amanda is happily married to Ed, has a comfortable conventional job as an architect and a loft in a still not discovered section of her unnamed city. Life is pretty good, although she admits there was more than one small thing or two about her husband that drives her a teensy bit crazy. “… I had become accustomed to a certain amount of irritation, as I’m sure all spouses do, and these were small arguments and disappointments that didn’t interrupt the steady flow of our marriage.” Nothing huge, just the little things, and otherwise life was grand.

At least that is what Amanda thinks, what she believes. The more you read Come Closer, though, the more you begin to doubt that little old Amanda was ever truly happy with dear dependable Ed even for a minute.

Okay, here’s the thing — Come Closer is a book about demonic possession. It’s not “kind of a demon,” or “maybe a demon,” — it’s a definitely come to freak you out and turn your life upside down and possibly eat your soul for lunch kind of demon. Early in the story, Amanda receives a book in the mail by mistake: Demon Possession Past and Present. The reader has to wonder just why this particular title came her way instead of the one she ordered (the appropriate Design Issues Past and Present). Soon enough, though, with Demon Possession as a handy guide, (it comes with a checklist, “Are YOU Possessed by a Demon?”), it becomes clear that Amanda has a serious problem. The problem reveals itself as an angry she-demon named Naamah, a creature who seems to think that Amanda is secretly happy to have her as a part of her life. And after Amanda burns Ed with a cigarette just because (because of Naamah — maybe), then the reader begins to think that old Naamah might not be too far off the mark.

Maybe the demon thing isn’t like The Exorcist. Maybe they don’t go looking for innocent children and instead focus on the adults who are already one step away from nasty on their own. We all have a few demonic tendencies in us anyway, Gran seems to be suggesting. Just think about it.

The weird thing about Naamah is that although Gran came up with the name on her own, she really is a demon — a legendary demon. Naamah dates back to the earliest stories in the Bible; she hangs out with Lilith the founding member of the original first wives club. As the author discovered when she researched the “real” Naamah, a lot about the demon is contradictory and confusing. Thus how she acts in the book is a combination of both Gran’s fiction and the fiction she found on the Internet about a demon that is at least mythologically real.

But you’ve got to wonder, what are the odds that an author would make up a name for a demon who ends up already existing?

Naamah is pretty much your typical “I like to hurt people and cause chaos” sort of demon, but Amanda is a character like few others I’ve encountered in literature. As one little thing after another drops into her life and makes you wonder just what the heck is going on (small strange noises, the dog that no longer recognizes her, the odd compulsion to burn others with cigarettes and don’t even get me started about the magazine guy), the question of just how upset Amanda is about Naamah’s sudden appearance in her life becomes quite the plot point. The obvious answer is that as soon as you start hitting the high score on the demon quiz you would get your little possessed ass to the nearest stained-glass-window-filled church and take a big bath in holy water. But while Amanda flirts with finding a cure, she never fully commits. And so things move forward as Naamah commands they do, and Amanda’s life takes one ugly turn after another on the very literal road to hell. And the ending is just what it should be — just, exactly, perfectly right.

What a wickedly cool, creepy book!

While she was writing Come Closer, Gran was splitting her time between New Orleans and New York. She moved full-time to New Orleans a year and half ago and finds herself firmly committed to staying. “NOLA is an enormously creative place,” she wrote me recently. “It makes you believe in ley lines or energy vortexes or something like that because it is so creative. It’s really changed my perception of what art is, back to a point of view that there are no special categories of people who are ‘artists’ — the only distinction is what people choose to do with their time.”

Sitting here in the very nicely decorated dining room of my utterly suburban house in a small town that in all respects seems very “artsy” (there are art galleries everywhere and the downtown really is the center of town), I am utterly and completely jealous of Sara Gran. I am out here on my own in the Pacific Northwest where yes, we are big time into the arts, but unless someone is standing next to you at Safeway with oil paint splattered on their shirt or an unfinished manuscript in their hands, you cannot tell that you are surrounded by people pursuing the arts. Everyone seems like a soccer mom here, even me. And maybe that’s what a character like Amanda is most afraid of; maybe that is what makes the demon even the smallest bit appealing.

Maybe all of us are just looking for something that makes us a tiny bit original and for those of us who can’t move to New Orleans, then we need something else. “This may be the last place in America where people choose to do crazy shit like get dressed up and run around the city wasted a few days a year rather than, say, watch TV,” writes Gran. “It’s truly inspiring, which is a word I don’t think I’ve used before, but for all its hokeyness it’s the only one that fits.”
Come Closer is not Sara Gran’s first book. She has also written a highly recommended noir mystery, Dope, among others. Right now she is at work on a novel set in New Orleans, which sounds like a perfect fit. She is physically in the place that inspires her like no other, and she’s writing about it as well. I can’t wait to see what magic the city works on her words or how she allows it to invade the atmospheres she so effortlessly creates with her basic idea, an average shallow character or two and a bit of mythology. New Orleans has been waiting for you Sara Gran; you are totally meant for each other.