Clio Louise Barnes leads a picture-perfect life as a stylist and influencer, but beneath the glossy veneer she harbors a not-so glamorous secret: she grew up in a haunted house. Well, not haunted. Possessed. After Clio’s parents’ messy divorce, her mother, Alex, moved Clio and her sisters into a house occupied by a demon. Or so Alex claimed. That’s not what Clio’s sisters remember or what the courts determined when they stripped her of custody after she went off the deep end. But Alex was insistent; she even wrote a book about her experience in the house.
After Alex’s sudden death, the supposedly possessed house passes to Clio and her sisters. Where her sisters see childhood trauma, Clio sees an opportunity for house flipping content. Only, as the home makeover process begins, Clio discovers there might be some truth to her mother’s claims. As memories resurface and Clio finally reads her mother’s book, a sinister presence in the house manifests, revealing ugly truths that threaten to shake Clio’s beautiful life to its very foundation.
Well, goddamnit.
As we are hurtling toward the end of the year, I’ve been keeping an extremely rough list of my favorite reads of the year in the back of my mind. Particularly horror novels, as that’s been the bulk of what I’ve read these last few months.
I think I was pretty fixed on Philip Fracassi’s THE AUTUMN SPRINGS RETIREMENT HOME MASSACRE being my favorite horror novel published in 2025, with THE LIVING DEAD by George A. Romero & Daniel Kraus being my favorite backlist title I read in 2025.
But then I read Rachel Harrison’s PLAY NICE & I think I have some reconsidering to do. This book fucking blew me away. Completely.
On the surface, PLAY NICE is deceptively simple: Clio Barnes, a successful influencer/stylist living a fast-paced life in New York City drops everything to renovate & flip her supposedly-possessed (different from haunted!) childhood home after the unexpected death of her mother.
What follows is a horror novel that simply refuses to be any one thing. PLAY NICE is funny as hell, profoundly heartfelt & insightful, and also very, very scary. This book deals with trauma & messy family dynamics in an extremely brutal & raw way.
When Clio gets the call that her mother has died, her reaction is just…mild surprise. Clio & her mother (Alex) don’t speak, and we learn right away that Clio & her two sisters (Leda and Daphne) cut Alex out of their lives after their traumatic childhood.
Something else that she inherits (in addition to a possessed house) is an annotated copy (or most of one) of the “true story” book that Alex wrote about their experiences in the house. So while Clio begins tackling things like painting & cleaning, she periodically reads passages from her Mom’s book (none of the sisters ever read the book, at the insistence of their father, after the very painful divorce that defined so much of their childhood)
And this is really where the book starts to get unbelievably twisty. Because as the reader, you are left totally unmoored. Clio herself isn’t the world’s most reliable narrator. And she’s been told her whole adult life that all the stories of the house being possessed were just that: stories. That Alex made it all up for attention, or because she was mentally ill. Or because she was an abusive alcoholic. But as the story unfolds, you begin to see Alex in a very different light than how she’s been perceived for most of Clio’s life. It’s just so fucking heartbreaking & complex.
So when things start going bump in the night inside this so-ordinary-it’s-creepy fixer-upper, you really don’t know what to believe. Or who. It’s a fiendishly clever way to construct this story, and Harrison kept me guessing all the way through!
The book asks a lot of questions about the nature of memory & how easily our memories are shaped by so many different factors: time, outside influence, trauma.
I think a lot of people might be a bit put off by Cleo as a main character, as she’s not written to be conventionally “likable.” But I actually found myself relating to a lot of aspects of her personality. Her family is deeply fractured, and Clio has kind of been “the glue” in many ways. The family has revolved around her for many years, for better or worse. Clio has nigh-unscalable walls built up around her, and lives in a perpetual state of “I’m ok. Everything is ok,” even when things are very much not ok.
I just really felt for her. I loved the different relationships throughout the book, especially between Clio & her sisters. And I adored the dynamic between Clio & Tommy, her brother-in-law. Something about Tommy reminded me a bit of Pete from “The Bear.” Like just this deeply earnest person, caught up in a family with a lot of trauma whose main form of communication is scathing sarcasm.
I’ve rambled on & on here, and just…I’m not sure what else I can say. Like I mentioned earlier, this book refuses to be any one thing. It’s really funny at times, it gets kinda sexy & a little romantic, it’s gut-wrenchingly emotional, and yeah…for me, I found it to be absolutely terrifying. There are scenes where Clio is working alone in the house that had me legitimately frozen with fear.
PLAY NICE is one of the best haunted (possessed) house novels I’ve ever read, period. I fucking loved every last thing about this book.
Grimdark Dad 