Play Nice

To the outside world, Clio Louise Barnes has a picture-perfect life as a stylist and influencer. What her followers don't know is that she grew up in a house her mother, Alex, insisted was occupied by a demon — a childhood of fear, instability, and a truth Clio has spent her adult life outrunning and denying.

When Alex dies suddenly and the house passes to Clio and her sisters, Clio decides to turn the renovation into content, refashioning the site of her worst memories into a comeback story. But as she strips the house back, she starts uncovering unsettling evidence that her mother's claims were not simply the product of illness or cruelty, and something in the house begins, quietly and then not so quietly, to make itself known.

Rachel Harrison's Play Nice is a clever, contemporary spin on the haunted-house novel, filtering supernatural dread through the glossy, performative world of social media. Beneath the scares it is a story about sisters, inherited trauma, and the way a family's private horrors refuse to stay buried.