I've been eager to read another Rachel Harrison novel ever since finishing 'So Thirsty'. I liked that book but found that its second half didn't live up to the promise of its first. This plays out far more consistently with a much deeper exploration of theme. It's a haunted house novel on the surface, and an unusual one at that, because this house is possessed by a demon rather than haunted by a ghost, but it's about much more than that, about all our personal demons, about family and trust and reconciliation.

Our lead is Clio Louise Barnes, the youngest of three sisters, all named from Greek mythology, so Leda and Daphne, and we meet them around the time that their mother dies. To Clio, that's mum, but to the others, she's just Alexandra because she hasn't been a mother to them for the longest time. This family was broken apart, apparently by mum going crazy and dad responding with what turned into an acrimonious divorce. None of them had seen her in years and Aunt Helen says that dad and his new wife Amy aren't welcome at the funeral. Not that they wanted to go anyway, and Leda and Daphne don't want to rekindle trauma, but, rather unexpectedly, Clio decides to go.

While that paragraph might place Clio in a positive light, I should point out that she's hard to like as this book kicks off. She's sassy and confident, as befits her work as some sort of influencer, but she's also selfish and manipulative. She also doesn't have a lot of filters, especially around family but also around others, like Ethan, who's treated horribly. She's also quintessentially female, not just because she's young and desirable but because she can see all the things that guys never do: where conversations are going, what will happen next, how people receive words. She hears what people mean when it isn't what they say. And she doesn't treat many of them well.

Clio remains our lead throughout, but Alexandra is really the heart of the book and she's dead as we join it, so we never get to form our opinions of her the way we do Clio and the others. We learn about her from the perspectives of others, most of whom see her negatively. Twenty pages in, we start to learn why, because she believed that the house all three girls grew up in was haunted by a demon and she wrote a book about both it and them, 'Demon of Edgewood Drive: The True Story of a Suburban Haunting'. None of them believe in that and so none of them have read it. Because they're our only conduit to Alexandra, we initially don't believe in it either. That will change.

Clearly, Rachel Harrison knows how to start a novel, which is arguably a much rarer skill than that of writing complete novels. Her prose is smooth and her dialogue effortless but she also conjures up deep themes quickly and powerfully without ever losing her edgy style. I still don't recognise a single one of her cultural references, presuming that Ann Taylor, Tom Ford and Oribe are brands and Santal 33 is a perfume, but that doesn't matter too much. What matters is that she creates a deeply flawed character like Clio who I'm almost conditioned not to like and yet somehow find a way to make me sympathise for her.

Apparently Alex never got rid of the house on Edgewood Drive. She tried to have it exorcised. She moved out, into a place with her demonologist boyfriend Roy. However, she wouldn't sell it until it was free. And it still isn't. Whatever she tried, it's still possessed by a demon, and, now that she's gone, it falls to Clio to take ownership, clean it up and sell it. It'll provide some income and plenty of content for her influencer channel. As you can imagine, it isn't that simple and she quickly finds herself in over her head as she encounters something in the house which rekindles memories from her time there as a child.

Much of what follows examines the relationship between Clio and her mother, even though Alex dies before we begin. Behind the veneer of edgy confident snark, Clio's a young lady who misses her mum, lost to her years before during a painful divorce. All three girls went with their father. It's not that Clio wants the house to be haunted but she does rather want her mother to have not been crazy, which inevitably amounts to the same thing. The more she spends time in the house, the more she remembers and the more she remembers, the more she she wonders how she might have got it all horribly wrong, rationalising things away when she should have taken them as read. It's a heck of a character study.

One way that Harrison deepens the relationship between Clio and Alex is to have the latter leave a copy of her book in the house for the former to find. What's more, it's annotated for her, which makes it all the more fascinating to read. Harrison includes whole chunks of that book in this one, annotations intact, so it feels like Alex is explaining things from beyond the grave. Cleverly, what Harrison manages to do here is to explain how a non fiction book can be true but not necessarily accurate and why, all while deepening her own fictional creation and furthering its plot. That's no trivial feat.

As a horror novel, this is unusual, especially in how it's set up and how it wraps up. In between, it's more like a traditional haunted house story, even though the demon is never clichéd. However, I would suggest that the most brutal moments aren't horror at all, arriving through simple drama instead. It's in moments of honesty or moments of control. Oddly, the one that got me isn't one of the scenes when Clio sees a memory in a different light, realising that her mum wasn't crazy after all, but when her father burns the second half of Alex's book in front of her. That's something you just don't do. She buys another one on eBay, of course, but that doesn't have annotations, so the demon adds its own for her.

Similarly, there are a number of instances of lovely phrasing, like these lines in Alex's paperback: "There's something terrible about that time between lightning and thunder. That cruel purgatory of anticipation, waiting for the universe to scream." However, the most telling line is far simpler, Clio confessing to herself that "I don't know how to not be in control". She has to get past that in this book because the reality on which she's built her entire life, whether house and family, isn't necessarily the truth. Her journey reminds me of Paige's in 'Pump Up the Volume', meaning that she has to admit that she isn't perfect before she can become herself. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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