Play Nice is a solid haunted house-meets-paranormal horror story, unraveling a decades long mystery through an old paperback and the haunted happenings of a house nobody wants to acknowledge. There are plenty of little scary moments that all add up to a freaky reading experience, and a solid final quarter of the book that leaves you on edge. At the end of the day, it’s the character work that really hits home for me. Harrison is such a great character creator and it’s beautifully on display in this latest entry. The book is a mix of character study, an examination of human relationships and the toll they take on us, the effect of fear on our psyche, and the horror of not being believed, all wrapped up in a narrative that’s impossible to put down. 

The Best Bits

A Few of My Favorite Things

A Character Story At The Core

Harrison’s greatest strength as a writer is her ability to examine the human side of any horror subgenre. Each of her books takes on something different – witchcraft, werewolves, vampires, haunted houses – and examines what the impact of those things are on the characters living within the story. It’s never about a scary thing to be beaten, it’s about accepting and living with a scary thing you can’t control by recognizing some kind of truth. The same concept is deployed in Play Nice, bringing us into the world of Clio and her family who are all in denial of a demon possessing their childhood home until it becomes very real. More than a typical haunted house story, it’s a journey of self acceptance by the protagonist, not only of herself but of the existence of things she can’t understand. 

The Paperback from an Unreliable Narrator

The decision to have part of the story told through her mother’s published book was brilliant. Through her book, we get to see the haunted house demonic story we expect to read, the kind we’ve seen in every paranormal horror movie. Things start to happen, the youngest child gets weird, the mother hears voices, everything devolves until a priest gets involved, there’s a horrifying final showdown and the movie fades to black. It’s all played up in her mother’s book and so much of it is a lie, created to sell the book to a publisher. When things start to happen from the book in modern day, it adds this constant confusion about what’s actually real. Are we about to see a Conjuring level haunting? Or is this something mundane like her sisters lead her to believe? You never know what’s real and at the end of the day, that’s not really the point. 

The Added Horror of Losing Your Mind

This was the most terrifying part for me, seeing a protagonist who is the perfect social media presence, loved by all, who slowly falls apart in a very public way. Everything starts to crumble, things are accidentally posted on socials, and suddenly an expectedly private haunting is viewable by her thousands of followers. We watch her whole life burn down around her and it’s so easy to blame her until you finally realize it’s exactly what the demon wanted to happen. It’s a brilliant twist, one that added so much to the book.