Come Closer

Amanda is a young architect with a steady marriage and a loft she loves. Then small things begin to slip. Something taps inside the walls, she starts smoking again, and she does something cruel to her husband without seeming to notice. In her dreams a woman with teeth stands on a sea the colour of blood.

A mail-order mix-up brings her a book on demonic possession when she had ordered a book about architecture. The quiz inside it describes her symptoms with unsettling accuracy. The book also proposes that the woman she dreams of could be Naamah, a demon from Kabbalistic lore. Her conduct grows more reckless, and Amanda has to decide whether something is taking her over or she is simply falling apart.

This is a short horror novel told in Amanda's own voice, so the reader sees only what she sees and trusts only what she admits. It never settles whether the cause is supernatural or psychological, and that open question is much of what unsettles. The tone is cold and intimate, and the dread builds out of ordinary domestic detail.

It was published by Soho Press in 2003. Kirkus compared it to The Yellow Wallpaper and Rosemary's Baby.