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.
A stylist and social-media influencer who inherits her late mother's house and films its renovation as content, only to find her mother's account of the haunting may have been true.
Clio's estranged late mother, known as Alex, who wrote the paranormal memoir 'Demon of Edgewood Drive' about the family's haunting. Her annotated copy drives the novel.
One of Clio's two elder sisters, who wants nothing to do with their mother's house.
One of Clio's two elder sisters, who wants nothing to do with their mother's house.
Play Nice is a standalone novel. Rachel Harrison writes her horror novels as self-contained books — The Return, Cackle, Such Sharp Teeth, Black Sheep and So Thirsty are all separate stories — so you can start here without having read any of the others.
The Penguin Audio edition runs 10 hours and 18 minutes and is read by two narrators. Alex Finke voices Clio's present-day story, while Natasha Soudek reads the passages from her mother's memoir, so the book's two competing accounts are given separate voices.
No. Demon of Edgewood Drive: The True Story of a Suburban Haunting is invented for the novel — it is the paranormal memoir Clio's mother wrote about the family's house, and Clio reads her mother's annotated copy of it through the book. The house, the street and the memoir are all fictional.