Come Closer
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. A book on demon possession suggests that the figure on the shore could be the demon Naamah, known to scholars of the Kabbalah as the second wife of Adam, who stole into his dreams and tricked him into fathering her child. Whatever the case, as the violence of her erratic behavior increases, Amanda knows that she must act to put her life right, or see it destroyed.
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What you might want to know about Come Closer
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A young architect in a happy marriage starts noticing things in her apartment, in her job, and in her own thoughts that do not quite fit who she is. The novella is her watching it happen, in first person.
Come Closer was written by Sara Gran and published in 2003. It is a short psychological horror novel about a young woman who suspects she is being possessed by a demon. The book was rediscovered by horror readers via TikTok and reissued.
Yes. Come Closer is widely cited as one of the most genuinely unsettling novellas of recent decades. The first-person voice and ambiguity about what is happening to the narrator give it a slow-burn dread.
Come Closer is 168 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Come Closer takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
Come Closer is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
Come Closer is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
