So he learns from the beginning: ‘That is probably a chair.’ And now how does he learn the question: ‘Is it also really a chair?’ Imagine that a child was…so clever that he could at once be taught the doubtfulness of the existence of all things. Her novel starts with an epigraph by Wittgenstein who says: Jemc says that in the novel she intended to cast doubt on what her characters and her readers think they know. But very soon strange things begin to happen. Excited to start anew, the move into their new suburban home is smooth and quick. The married couple decides to move when James’s gambling debts get too high. Ancient, husky, and rasping but underwater.” The real estate agent interrupts, “It’s just the house settling.” He is wrong. When James and Julie are house searching, they are stopped by a noise, “deep and vibrating, like throat singing.
The more they are disturbed by the unknown of the house and its surrounding area, the more is revealed of the dysfunction of their relationship. At her reading during the Texas Book Festival, Jemc spoke about using the haunted house trope as a metaphor for the couple’s deeply rooted problems.
Jac Jemc’s new novel, The Grip of It, is a story of a haunted house and the couple within it.
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