Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Come Closer
    Unavailable
    Come Closer
    Unavailable
    Come Closer
    Ebook140 pages2 hours

    Come Closer

    By Sara Gran

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    “What begins as a sly fable about frustrated desire evolves into a genuinely scary novel about possession and insanity. Hypnotic” (Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho).
     
    A recurrent, unidentifiable noise in her apartment. A memo to her boss that’s replaced by obscene insults. Amanda—a successful architect in a happy marriage—finds her life going off kilter by degrees. She starts smoking again, and one night for no reason, without even the knowledge that she’s doing it, she burns her husband with a cigarette. At night she dreams of a beautiful woman with pointed teeth on the shore of a blood-red sea.
     
    The new voice in Amanda’s head, the one that tells her to steal things and talk to strange men in bars, is strange and frightening, and Amanda struggles to wrest back control of her life. Is she possessed by a demon, or is she simply insane? Described as “a new kind of psychological thriller” by George Pelecanos and “this year’s scariest novel” by Time Out New York, Come Closer has become a modern classic “with a kick that will stay with the reader for days afterward” (The Dallas Morning News).
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJul 1, 2003
    ISBN9781569479223
    Author

    Sara Gran

    Sara Gran is the author of Saturn’s Return to New York, Come Closer, Dope, as well as two previous novels featuring Claire DeWitt. Her work has been published in more than a dozen countries. Born in Brooklyn, Sara lived in New York City until 2004. She now lives in Los Angeles and has a successful career writing for television.

    Read more from Sara Gran

    Related to Come Closer

    Related ebooks

    Thrillers For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Tender Is The Flesh

      Jan 29, 2020

      RELEASED 6 FEBRUARY 224 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Augustina Bazterrica Publisher Pushkin Press This is a pretty unpleasant book. It’s clearly meant to be, but knowing that doesn’t make it any less unsettling to read. It’s set in a near future wh

      1 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Paul Tremblay

      Dec 3, 2020

      For the first time in weeks, I was swept along into that trance, that magic inner space where stories live. The post A Year in Reading: Paul Tremblay appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Terrify Yourself with These Ten Horror Novels

      Jun 19, 2019

      A list of books so scary you definitely won't keep them on your nightstand. The post Terrify Yourself with These Ten Horror Novels appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Speaking Of Horror

      Sep 12, 2020

      Speaking Of Horror
      14 min read

    • Article

      Paul Tremblay

      Jun 17, 2020

      IT’S ALWAYS BEEN ONE OF MY BIGGEST FEARS that I would live to see the end of everything,” says Paul Tremblay, speaking to SFX from his Massachusetts home in the middle of lockdown. It’s a singularly peculiar time, and a peculiar interview for him to

      3 min read

    • Article

      Ghosts

      Nov 29, 2019

      Ghosts
      5 min read

    • Article

      It Happened to Me…

      Apr 21, 2022

      It Happened to Me…
      8 min read

    • Article

      Home Horror Stories

      Aug 21, 2020

      Home Horror Stories
      7 min read

    • Article

      It Happened to Me…

      Sep 7, 2023

      It Happened to Me…
      8 min read

    • Article

      Home Truths

      Sep 26, 2021

      Home Truths
      4 min read

    • Article

      “Really?”

      Jun 2, 2022

      “Really?”
      6 min read

    • Article

      Ribs, Muscle, Bone

      Jan 7, 2020

      Ribs, Muscle, Bone
      10 min read

    • Article

      When Your New York Apartment Has a Secret Literary Past

      Mar 13, 2017

      It was about three years ago now that my boyfriend and I met the broker of our current apartment. On that December morning, we walked down 84th Street, scanning the building numbers until we found our destination. I felt mildly disappointed as the br

      14 min read

    • Article

      It Happened to Me…

      Apr 18, 2024

      It Happened to Me…
      9 min read

    • Article

      Valley Oaks Drive

      Mar 1, 2021

      Valley Oaks Drive
      10 min read

    • Article

      It Happened To Me…

      Jan 26, 2023

      It Happened To Me…
      7 min read

    • Article

      ‘Sing to It’: Featured Fiction from Amy Hempel

      Mar 25, 2019

      If she was home at night in her husband’s bed, did he care what she did with her days? The post ‘Sing to It’: Featured Fiction from Amy Hempel appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      It Happened to Me…

      Nov 4, 2021

      When my son was around one, many items of his clothing began to inexplicably disappear. I can’t over-emphasise the inexplicable nature of what occurred – all the items unquestionably disappeared in my house. The house is always secure, and there is n

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Bird

      Jun 18, 2021

      DON’T think I’ve ever felt cold I like this before. There wasn’t a hint of snow anywhere but the cold went all the way down to my bones. Even here in a minibus taxi packed with plenty of warm bodies, the cold bit. I was only wearing a T-shirt and a t

      5 min read

    • Article

      Nugrybauti

      Apr 24, 2019

      Nugrybauti
      8 min read

    • Article

      Speedboat

      Mar 24, 2022

      Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written – disrupting a cliché and, presumably, creating a genre. That was a dream, of course, but many of the most important things, I fi nd,

      14 min read

    • Article

      A rapist was HIDING IN THE WALLS

      Sep 3, 2020

      Paul Verhoeven, 37, Melbourne, Vic Wandering around my parents’ walk-in-wardrobe, I noticed the pile of cardboard boxes stacked in the corner. I was only seven, but knowing they contained items relating to my dad John’s work as a police officer, I

      3 min read

    Reviews for Come Closer

    4/5

    630 ratings42 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      This is one of the most truly chilling books I have ever read. I found myself jumping at every small noise in my house for at least a week after I completed this novella and found myself scared of the dark for the first time since childhood.If you are a fan of psychological horror, such as I am, this book is HIGHLY recommended.
    • 4/5
      Well written...an easy read and super-creepy.
    • 4/5
      A short novella about a woman who's slowly being possessed by a demon. Creepy and psychological. I read this as a metaphor for mental illness, such as schizophrenia, and it how takes a person over.
    • 4/5
      Super creepy! This is a surprising little book. It seems benign in the beginning but quickly becomes unsettling. It's a fast read and the suspense keeps building until the thrilling conclusion. I would recommend this to fans of horror. Very good.
    • 3/5
      This was the lightest read I have had all year. It was short, quick, and simply written. I started it this morning and finished it in the afternoon. Enjoyable read. A Woman who leads a normal life married to a great guy. She has everything going for her when she starts experiencing some weird things. you get to see the transition she goes through as she becomes posessed by this Demon.
    • 4/5
      Well written...an easy read and super-creepy.
    • 3/5
      This was a decent little novella. I would recommend it to people who enjoy demon possession books. It's not nearly as graphic as many books in this genre - which I liked. But at the same time I felt like it was a bit of a slow start and nearly DNF'ed it after 30 pages. If you're on an airplane or at the beach, push through - it has a fairly satisfying ending.
    • 4/5
      This was a near-perfect demonic possession story. To be as short as it is, the plot is well-developed and paced. Some parts were a little hokey, but overall, a good, scary read.
    • 5/5
      Very creepy! Made me deeply uncomfortable at times...a great quick read!
    • 4/5
      I thought this book was gonna end up being that she had Multiple personalities but no it wasn't. It was a good short read. Spooky.
    • 3/5
      I would have preferred to hear more from Naamah because the main character was pretty boring, it was hard to get into and it shouldn't have been.
    • 4/5
      Descent into madness or actual possession? That's up to the reader to decide.
    • 4/5
      I really loved this book funny really to say it’s a horror!!!! It was such a quick and easy read and I found myself not being able to put it down as it keeps you hooked…….I found myself asking the same question throughout reading the book “ how would you not know ?” Which found me getting agitated at Amanda and her husband Ed.

      I’m not going to spoil it for anyone but the ending was a perfect conclusion to the book, granted it wasn’t the ending I would have preferred but that’s just my preference.

      All in all it was a great read and I’ve now bought it in physical copy just so I can annotate it and unleash the agitation in the pages.

      I will definitely be picking up more books from this author that’s for sure
    • 4/5
      I really liked the story as I wasn't sure what the outcome would be. It was chilling in its descriptions of someone unraveling.
    • 5/5
      Sickeningly beautiful in a disturbing and poetic way.
      I’ve never read someone’s point of view of demonic possession as it was happening….so that was interesting.
    • 3/5
      There were things I liked and things I could have liked more. It was a solid book. Nothing more, nothing less.
    • 4/5
      It was a good book slow at first but then picks up as you go on
    • 5/5
      Dayum.

      Okay, takes a little bit to get going. Too much telling instead of showing early on. I found myself impatient for some action. But it picks up, and picks up more, and by the time books were burning in the fireplace I was well and truly gone.

      Wonderful narration too.
    • 4/5
      Short and disturbing story of possession from the inside out; guaranteed nightmares ...
    • 5/5
      I've never before met a book that was beautiful and terrifying at the same time; now I have. There are so many appeal terms that could be applied to this book: compelling (I read it in about 3 hours), frightening, thought-provoking, lyrical (I mean, seriously, a lyrically written horror novel, are you kidding me?!). It's just so many things. And then, of course, there's the demon possession thing. But it's so smoothly incorporated that you feel it slowly, much as the narrator does.

      I picked this up as part of Women in Horror month, and I'm so glad I did. The only bad thing I have to say about it is that I wish I hadn't read it at night.
    • 5/5
      Keeps you up all night, can't wait for the next book. If you have some great stories like this one, you can publish it on Novel Star, just submit your story to hardy@novelstar.top or joye@novelstar.top
    • 4/5
      Oddly hypnotic - sucks you in until the very end. Interesting way of writing, very imaginative and does make you just a little paranoid, like all good thrillers. Nicely done.
    • 3/5
      I was creeped out from page one, but as the possession went on I feel like it got less creepy and more sad. The last couple of chapters picked up again, though, and there were several places where I gasped out loud.
    • 5/5
      It was spellbinding , I love this book, hard to put down!
    • 2/5
      Come Closer. Sara Gran. 2003. This book was billed as one of the “year’s scariest novel;” however I found it creepy, but not by any means as frightening as the reviewers did. It is a book about possession and very little else. That is the plot and there is very little character development. William Peter Blatty’s The Exorist and Legion were more scarier to me. It is short and suspenseful but obviously not for everyone.
    • 4/5
      A quick intense read worth a few hours. The story is tight and well crafted. As a horror story it stands on its own as a fine work. (Spoilers ahead) The power in this story is in the questions you ask yourself about it. As a straightforward account of a demon possession the story is what it is; fine. This story poses questions about powers that can dominate our lives; loneliness, needs that we do not fully understand how to address, our subconscious mechanisms for coping with pain, and self amongst others. Fun read.
    • 3/5
      It was just...very disturbing and I while it was a quick read, I wonder if perhaps some it was a bit too surface level in terms of character development for my tastes.
    • 4/5
      Come Closer definitely kept me interested to keep reading and find out where the story would go. I'm not much of a reader but have wanted to read horror stories for a while now. I found it easy to digest, and though some of the language and events in the book are described basically, where they could go into more depth, it was a good read, and short enough length to get me back into reading without feeling intimidated by the number of pages. As someone who has not really found a horror movie that scared me I wouldn't say this is particularly scary, but it's definitely enticing, much like the demon.
    • 5/5
      nice book. very nice book. recommended read. excellent book. yes indeed it is a splendid read
    • 4/5
      It was a nice quick read, but not so great