The Grip of It

What is better? To accept the horror presented before you or search for a way out? To hunt in yourself for a comparable defect or to pull yourself tall and strong to support the correction of someone else's faults?
--Jac Jemc, The Grip of It

Jac Jemc, a Chicago author of a number of award-winning novels and short story collections, has been popularly heralded as a successor to literary practitioners such as Shirley Jackson and Henry James. I don't know that I'd go that far. Frankly, her prose style reminds me more of that of Virginia Wolfe. I mean, let's face it, Jackson and James set a pretty high bar, especially in the category of comparison intended, that being literary horror.

Nonetheless, Jemc is inventive and effective, even if occasionally a tad too effusive. It's a bit difficult to know just what The Grip of It is "about", just as it is a bit difficult to know just what James' The Turn of the Screw is about--which is to say that this is not necessarily a bad thing in the case of this literary 'spook story'. Even if it seems somewhat derivative in some aspects--one cannot help but think of Stephen' King's The Shining, for instance, in abbreviated form--Jemc does succeed in telling an eerie tale of hauntings in her own direful tone. Moreover, she somehow manages to leave a mind-impression that proves creepier on later rumination than the actual text had seemed. I found, for my own part, that uneasy dreams were being suggested by certain events in the novel, as if parts of the story had plugged themselves into something essential on a psychological or subconscious level.

This in itself persuades me of the worthiness of The Grip of It in the genre.