Review of Play Nice—Demons and Dysfunctional Families

Every family has their demons. But for the Barnes family, theirs are a little more literal… Rachel Harrison, best known for her monster stories Such Sharp Teeth and So Thirsty, tackles the haunted house and demonic possession genres in her latest horror novel, Play Nice, which came out back in September. If you like horror that centers on messy women and dysfunctional families, don’t miss this one!

Clio Barnes is still the baby of the family, even all grown up and living in NYC with a successful career as a fashion influencer and stylist. So when their estranged mother Alexandra is found dead in a house that holds bad memories for the family, Clio’s older sisters want to protect her from dredging up the past. But Clio can barely remember the allegedly traumatic experience of living at Edgewood Drive. She knows her mother was an erratic alcoholic who barely kept in touch after losing custody of her three daughters. She knows her mother believed the house was haunted by a demon. But what was Alexandra doing back at the house on the night of her death? Was she really as crazy and selfish as everyone says? Or could there be any truth to the haunting? Tired of being coddled and underestimated, Clio decides the best way to get some answers and some closure is to take on the project of renovating the house at Edgewood Drive to get it ready to sell. Plus, home makeovers make for great social media content. But the longer Clio spends at the house, the more she comes to suspect that Alexandra’s demons weren’t only in her head. And that perhaps she wasn’t the only member of the family with skeletons in her closet.

Play Nice explores one of the key tropes that is central to most haunting narratives: the unreliable narrator. Alexandra, with her substance abuse and mental health issues, has always been considered an unreliable narrator of her own life story by her children and ex-husband. This point is driven home as Clio reads an annotated copy of her mother’s memoir, The Demon at Edgewood Drive, sections of which are excerpted in the story. Clio adamantly refutes her mother’s version of events, which paints Clio as the stereotypical Creepy Child in a possession movie. But as Clio slowly begins to doubt her own credibility, she wrestles with whether her mother might have been telling the truth. As Clio explores deeper into the secrets of her family’s past, she too becomes an unreliable narrator—losing memories and chunks of time, losing control of her emotions. Is it even possible to remain sane in a house possessed?

Reading this book made me realize that I really haven’t read much in the demon possession genre. Play Nice is a haunted house tale, but the house is haunted by a demon rather than a ghost. But what is a demon? In this book, they are described by one of the occult experts that Alexandra calls in as “beings of attachment”—they like to attach themselves to either houses or humans (sometimes both), and they crave attention. Although the demon that haunts Edgewood Drive can take on a quite terrifying (and rather bestial) corporeal form, its presence is more often noncorporeal. And most of the harm it causes is inside its victims’ heads. As Alexandra says: “I don’t know if it wants to hurt me. It . . . it wants me to hurt myself.” The demon brings out the worst in the people who come under its influence and exacerbates their own flaws, insecurities, and mental illnesses. That’s what makes it so hard to defeat—how do you confront the darkest parts of yourself?

I found Play Nice to be a great entry into the demon possession genre, and it brings it into the modern age of Instagram and influencers. The central characters are deeply flawed—but those flaws are what allows the demon to get its hooks in. You can find Play Nice on shelves now at your favorite local retailer, or buy a copy online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve already read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments!