Book Review: Play Nice

Warning: this review contains spoilers

Play Nice by Rachel Harrison is about Clio Barnes, a twentysomething fashion influencer who grew up idolizing her dad and hating her mom. When her estranged mother dies, Clio is the only one in her immediate family who attends the funeral. Her father and two sisters refuse to be there.

Clio decides to temporary move back into her childhood home (where her mom had been living before her death) in order to clean it up and put it on the market.

Her mother had insisted for years that there was a demon in the house, and often blamed this malicious entity for her bizarre behavior and mistreatment of her kids. While staying at the house, Clio reads the book her mom wrote about her experiences.

She begins to experience creepy supernatural occurrences of her own and realizes that her mom, despite all her many faults, wasn’t completely crazy after all.

Clio strikes up a sexual relationship with Austin, her mom’s neighbor. Austin lives with his mom and wears slobby clothes – attributes that Clio finds extremely attractive for some reason. Women like Clio usually think that guys like Austin are beneath them, so I guess this is supposed to be ironic.

In any case, Austin is the most likeable character in the story. He’s a genuine, well meaning guy who is bedazzled by Clio’s beauty but has enough self respect to not act needy or put her on a pedestal.

This is my second Rachel Harrison book after So Thirsty. Some of my book club friends call her novels “pop corn books” or “potato chip books” and those are, indeed, apt descriptions.

Harrison has built a successful career writing consumable, easy to read works. Like I said in my review of So Thirsty, she is not the author for you if you’re looking for something with fancy prose.

Play Nice spends most of its pages on the figurative demons that haunt Clio and the rest of her family. I was struck by how the actual demon feels like an afterthought. It’s not even 100% clear that there is a literal demon until it’s finally confirmed very late in the book.

Harrison has run the gamut of horror monsters. She’s written about vampires (So Thirsty), werewolves (Such Sharp Teeth), cultists (Black Sheep) and witches (Cackle). It seems like she wasn’t genuinely enthused about a demon story, but wrote it because she was running out of classic horror villains to use. This novel feels more like a family drama than a horror story.

Clio is a decent but unexceptional main character. I enjoyed her self confidence and snarky humor, but her arrogance and narcissism kept me from really caring about what happened to her. It’s great to have a flawed protagonist, but we should be able to empathize with them to an extent.

I also found it problematic that Clio’s mom becomes redeemed (at least partially) in Clio’s eyes. Sure, her mom was right about the demon, but that doesn’t change the fact that she was an abuser and a drunk. To me, there is no possible excuse or justification for her behavior.

It would be different if the mom was actually possessed by the demon and wasn’t in control of her actions. The novel surprisingly doesn’t take the story in this direction.

A demon story without a possession is a weird choice. This, again, makes me think that Harrison wasn’t really enthused with writing this type of genre. You’d think the demon would be used as an allegory or metaphor for the family’s issues, but that doesn’t really happen, either.

The novel concludes with a surprisingly upbeat ending that doesn’t feel warranted. I was expecting a much darker conclusion.