“…a cerebral haunting in book form, a page-turning, suspenseful read that will stay with you long after you’ve finished it … Like the work of Leonora Carrington, the effective terror of The Grip of It comes with sudden juxtaposition of the surreal, both in the subject’s environment and within the subject’s persona … The Grip of It stalks the reader through its pages with a silent, grayscale terror, like the brush of a web against your cheek in the dark … Jemc is telling us the story of the putrefaction of a relationship. This relationship is not clean-cut and bookended by dramatic flares?—?it festers, untended, a thriving hotbed for the things that break us down, cell by cell … What makes this novel so powerful is the acknowledgement that intimacy does require a trust beyond logic, that ‘ruin’ can come just as easily to the guilty or the guiltless, and an embrace of the chaos is sometimes the only way to make it out to the other side.”
–Matt E. Lewis, Electric Literature, August 16, 2017
