“It takes so much to build an image. It takes next to nothing to destroy one.”

Clio Barnes, and her two sisters Leda and Daphne grew up in a haunted house. They spent much of their childhood in Edgewood Drive, a place where their mum, Alexandra, succumbed to drinking, a place that their mother swore was haunted. When their mother was deemed unfit to take care of them, they moved in with their father and didn’t see Alexandra again. Now their mother has passed away and left the house to them. Leda and Daphne want nothing to do with the house, they do not want to dredge up painful memories of the past. Though Clio, being an influencer, thinks differently, she sees the house as an opportunity to create content for her socials, what could gain her more followers than renovating such a mysterious house? And surely everyone is wrong, surely their mother was just crazy, surely the house isn’t really haunted?

Play Nice by Rachel Harrison is powerfully feminist, cleverly uncanny and darkly witty. Harrison never fails to deliver addictive, contemporary horror with a good slice of fun! 

This is my fourth novel by Rachel Harrison and her mix of unhinged female characters and slowly building horror always ticks the right boxes for me. I think in Play Nice Clio is perhaps my favourite character of Harrison‘s, which came as a surprise because with Clio being an influencer (I won’t grumble here about how much I hate the term influencer!) I thought her character would be insufferable and shallow. However, that’s not actually the case. Yes, Clio’s lifestyle is all about her image, her dress sense, her glam lifestyle and how she presents herself on camera, but Clio is more than that, she’s also witty, her dialogue is full of banter and sharp comedic remarks. She’s very aware that content creators such as herself present a level of fakeness and wear masks, and in turn that suits her personality perfectly because Clio feels the need to mask a lot of her own true feelings. She’s quick to deflect from anything resembling serious emotions or from having serious conversations. See Clio is spritey and fun, how could she ever feel anything other than happy and carefree? Harrison gives readers a glimpse underneath Clio’s mask and what we see is a lot of vulnerability. Clio clearly has a self-destructive tendency, she can’t distinguish between genuine concern and other people’s judgement, this stemming from the fact that she’s never faced her past, she’s never confronted her feelings towards her mother. This is the story Harrison then delivers and I was captured entirely by the journey. 

“So much of my life I’ve been preoccupied with beauty, and this

face in front of me erases it all.

Big milky eyes. Red slits for pupils. A gaping, drooling mouth crowded with sharp teeth. A long, slim crimson tongue split like a snake.

I wonder if it loves me most because I can see it in all hideousness, in all its glorious depravity, and I won’t turn away.”

This is a family that all carry their own demons that have nothing to do with the one possessing the house. I really enjoyed the way Harrison plays with memories and how distorted they can become, how the stories of people’s lives become twisted depending on the perspective of the person who’s telling them. Leda and Daphne view their mother in quite a harsh light, they hate and despise her because their memories of her are unpleasant, frightening, chaotic and to them their father is their saviour. Yet, Aunt Helen paints a different picture, with their mother, her sister, doing everything she could to protect her children, drinking because there was too much on her shoulders to bear and the girls’ father being the root of all of her sister’s problems. Their father swears Alexandra was an unfit, erratic and an abusive mother, that his girls were so much happier when he brought them to live with him and their stepmother, Amy. Whose version can Clio really trust? There’s a lot to unpick which kept me thoroughly engaged throughout.

Harrison cleverly provides us with another perspective as well by including excerpts from Alexandra’s book, The Demon of Edgewood Drive, which she had annotated throughout for Clio. The perspective of Alexandra reveals a woman who buckled under the weight of looking after three young children in a house that she was convinced was malevolent. There are a lot of confessions in the book but also many embellishments, so again it is unreliable. For Clio things are even more unreliable due to the gaps in her memories. She reads about so many tales of her past that she has no recollection of, such as the boy Austin who said he knew her when she lived at Edgewood Drive but she doesn’t remember him. Then she reads about the way the house seemed to have a special interest in her and the way she could hear the demon within. This is where things get spooky and from the moment Clio returns to the house that’s when the creepiness really kicks in. Harrison fantastically builds up all the tropes of a haunted house. Strange noises, objects being moved, whispers in the dark, moving shadows and malevolent eyes. Towards the end the horror really ramped up but alongside this we have Clio’s breakdown, her mask slipping, her life turning to utter chaos. Some truths are revealed, some demons are faced and Harrison begs the question, when will women truly be seen and not judged? When will they be understood, empathised with and not condemned?

“The silence is somehow more menacing than the strange noises, than the dragging, the scraping. The laughing. This silence isn’t calm, it’s waiting. There’s something coiling inside it, I know. I can feel it. I believe it. If I were to close my eyes, I would see it.

Sometimes silence isn’t peace, it’s war.”

Play Nice delves into family drama, childhood trauma and a house haunted by a demon in such a fresh and witty way.

ARC provided by Kabriya at Titan Books in exchange for an honest review—thank you for the copy!

Play Nice is available now – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org