Rachel Harrison has done it again with Play Nice. She’s taken a familiar horror trope (haunted house) and upended expectations and livened it up with some feminist and modern sensibility. Clio is a fashion influencer, youngest of three sisters who lives in NYC thanks in part to her dad’s bank account. When her estranged mother passes away, Clio and her sisters Daphne and Leda inherit the house where they lived with their mother for a brief time. The house on Edgewood Drive isn’t an ordinary house, it is a haunted house and so much so that Clio’s mother Alex wrote a book about it – The Demon of Edgewood Drive. That book only drove a larger wedge between Alex and her kids, but despite that, Clio feels compelled to attend her mother’s funeral. With her life as an influencer affording her little constraints on time or a normal work life, Clio decides to spend time at the house on Edgewood and try to fix it up and flip it.
Clio soon learns that maybe her mother wasn’t insane and something is indeed possessing the house.
The book her mother wrote (long thought to be out of print) makes an appearance and while Clio spends time in the house, she reads her mother’s story and immediately identifies the thinly veiled analogues for her and her sister. The book is very much a journal-like account of what Alex experienced in the possessed home, with the words on the page unlocking buried memories, or shedding a different light on assumptions Clio (and her sisters) made for many years.
As the youngest, Clio was at a very vulnerable age when her parents split up, making her susceptible to raw emotions and maybe a demonic entity looking to latch onto a human. Clio’s past comes to the present as she notices notes and smiley faces in the book she’s reading. Is her naivete in the present (she’s in her early 20s) affecting her perceptions? Is her father’s coddling of her making her life too easy to live as an “influencer?” Because the novel is told in the first person from Clio’s perspective, readers are naturally going to warm up to her and feel empathy for her and her perspective. But is she truly a reliable narrator? What happens to an influencer whose online personality may be influenced by something sinister? What happens when Clio begins experience things similar to the events her mother conveyed in her book and people don’t believe her?
I will be completely honest and up front here – on the surface of this book – a book about a social media fashion influencer being haunted – chances are I might pass on reading it. Just not something (a social media influencer as protagonist) that thought I would connect with (says a person who posts regularly on social media talking about books and beer – yes, I can be a hypocrite). However, the fact that Rachel Harrison wrote this book made it a must-read. I’ve come to trust her over the course of the last few years and she absolutely delivered something very special in Play Nice. That something special starts with Clio.
Clio is such a complex, real, and not always likeable character. She’s human, in other words. I love that Harrison upended my expectation of Clio, sure she has vapid moments (who doesn’t really), but as I got to know her, know her backstory and why she grew into the person I met on page one, I appreciated her so much more. Some of the moments when she seems willingly oblivious were annoying, of course. Maybe her sisters did shield her from certain things because she was younger, her sisters weren’t exactly adults when they all experienced the events depicted in their mother’s book, they were doing what they thought was best to protect Clio.
Rachel Harrison’s novels often feature interpersonal relationships, female relationships in particular, at the heart of the story. Here, the three sisters have very different personalities, they don’t often get along, but their sisterly bond can’t be denied. Trauma is examined through the story, the trauma their mother Alex experienced as well as the haunting and attempts at possession Clio experiences. The demon serves as a metaphorical lens for trauma and how women in media are treated. These things very much put at the forefront a potent idea that should be simple: believe women.
While Clio’s relationship with her sisters is one heart of the novel, the budding romance with Austin was at points frustrating and lovely to experience as it unfolded. The frustration is with Clio herself, she (understandably) is hesitant to allow people (especially potential romantic partners) get close to her and has the potential to sabotage things for herself. Possibly because Austin lives in the Edgewood neighborhood and remembers Clio from her time living there as a kid, this relationship is different. Also, because he’s the complete opposite of what she might see as a match for herself. Austin isn’t perfect, but Harrison gives him heart, understanding, and patience.
There wasn’t as much of a “kick-wham” moment in Play Nice as Harrison’s previous novels, but some of the revelations do come across in a well-measured and perfectly placed manner. As the novel hurtled towards its conclusion, Harrison dug her hooks into me more and more, the book kept getting better, I felt the heart of it beating more rapidly, I felt more empathy and love for Clio and her sisters, and Austin (and even her dad) and once the book ended, I felt it was very much an earned ending. It isn’t always the case that characters earn the ending they get regardless of good or bad outcome, but Harrison has been able to nail down that element of her storytelling very well.
Rachel Harrison has become one of the defining voices of Horror fiction the last half-decade. It is tough for me to rank Play Nice in her shelf of books, but that’s largely because they have all been of such high quality – supremely entertaining, extremely potent and with a distinct voice, and they all have Something Important to Say. But her book say these Important Things in such a way that they are core to the story and don’t preach or beat you about the head with a Message. It is a tricksy balance, but Harrison is very agile at walking that line
Shout out to the art department and book design by Kristin del Rosario because the color palette and art work are extremely eye catching and evocative. The cover does a great job of capturing the story. As eye-popping as the digital image of the book is, the physical book in person really is a nice piece of art in and of itself.
Highly Recommended.
© 2025 Rob H. Bedford
Hardcover | 336 Pages
September 2025 | Berkley Publishing
https://www.rachel-harrison.com/
Excerpt: https://reactormag.com/excerpts-play-nice-by-rachel-harrison/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Berkley
