by Rachel Harrison

Published: 2025

Genre: Horror / Dark Comedy

Play Nice gets 4 stars because it takes a familiar haunted-house setup and makes it messier: a toxic family, a mother’s possibly fictionalized book, a father who may have spent years reshaping the truth, sisters with their own damage, and an entity that acts less like a ghost and more like a bored, needy parasite. The house is scary, but the better horror is Clio realizing every source of truth has been contaminated.

---

Non-Spoiler Review

Rachel Harrison got me again.

Play Nice is a haunted house novel, a family trauma novel, a book-about-a-book mystery, a sister-war comedy, and a supernatural gaslighting machine all stuffed inside one ugly, damaged house. It should probably feel overcrowded. Instead, it moves fast, bites hard, and keeps shifting under your feet just enough that you never feel fully safe with anyone’s version of the truth.

I read this in two days, which is fast for me. Usually I take a week or two. This one had the hook in early: Clio returns to the house her mother made infamous, trying to figure out what actually happened there and whether the story she grew up around was truth, exaggeration, family damage, or something worse.

That is the best part of the book: everybody feels unreliable. Not just Clio. Not just her mother’s book. Not just the family. Everybody seems to be carrying some mixture of memory, resentment, fear, self-protection, and bullshit. It turns the novel into a haunted-house puzzle where the scariest question is not simply, “Is the house haunted?” It is, “Who benefits from making Clio doubt herself?”

The house itself is one of the strongest pieces. I liked the home-renovation angle more than I expected. Clio wanting to fix up the house gives the story a practical engine: clean it, patch it, sell it, escape it. But the more she tries to fix the house, the more the house works on her. The renovation plot is not just background decoration. It becomes the perfect metaphor. You can repaint walls. You can patch holes. You can stage a property. But you cannot remodel a rotten family history without finding what is still alive underneath it.

The entity is also more interesting than a standard haunted-house presence. It is not just evil in the usual growling, possession-movie way. It feels playful. Petty. Bored. Needy. Attention-starved. It wants interaction. It wants a reaction. It wants to keep the game going. That made it feel stranger than a typical demon, and honestly more disturbing. A monster that hates you is one thing. A monster that thinks you are entertainment is worse.

Clio worked for me as a protagonist. I usually do not love influencers as main characters, but Rachel Harrison makes it work. Clio’s comedy is armor. Her influencer persona is armor. Her “I don’t care” routine is armor. The more the book goes on, the more obvious it becomes that she is not untouched by what happened. She is just the one who learned to survive by making everything a joke before anyone else could hurt her with it.

And Harrison is funny. That matters. A lot of horror writers can write dread. Fewer can make a character genuinely funny without turning the horror into a joke. Harrison’s comedy works because it does not erase the ugliness. It sharpens it.

The sister dynamic is excellent too. Funny, cruel, defensive, loyal, unfair, and believable. These women love each other, resent each other, misunderstand each other, and keep reopening wounds while pretending they are trying to heal them. That family tension is where the book gets a lot of its bite.

For me, Play Nice lands as one of Harrison’s stronger books. I still put Black Sheep at the top, and I probably still like Such Sharp Teeth slightly more, but this may beat Cackle for me. I have now read enough Rachel Harrison to say she has a real lane: funny women, ugly feelings, supernatural weirdness, and horror that knows the monster is rarely the only problem in the room.

Play Nice is not the scariest haunted-house novel I have read, but it is one of the more fun ones to untangle. It kept me asking what was true, who was lying, who remembered correctly, and whether any family can survive once every buried version of the past starts crawling out of the walls.

Spoiler Section

The more I think about Play Nice, the more I think the real horror is not just the demon. It is the way every person in Clio’s life has edited the past.

Alexandra’s book is the obvious example. She wrote a version of the haunting for public consumption, and Clio knows that. She knows her mother probably shaped, exaggerated, and dramatized things to make the book sell. That is what makes Clio’s obsession with reading it so interesting and dangerous. She is not reading a clean record. She is reading a contaminated object. But she is desperate enough for truth that she keeps digging through the contamination anyway.

Then the annotated versions complicate everything. At first, it feels like Alexandra is speaking directly to Clio. Then it feels like the entity is speaking through the book. That is where Clio starts to lose her grip. The book stops being evidence and starts becoming infection. She wants truth, but every new version pollutes the water.

Alexandra became more complicated than I expected. At first, it is easy to read her as unstable, selfish, exploitative, or abusive because of the book she wrote and because of how the family talks about her. But by the end, I was much less comfortable judging her that simply. She may have embellished. She may have damaged her daughters. She may have used the story. But she also may have been trying, in her broken way, to protect them from something real.

The father is uglier the more you think about him. His affair, his control, his rewriting of events, his ability to make himself the stable parent while Alexandra becomes the crazy one — that is some of the most effective horror in the book. The demon may be real, but the father’s version of reality did damage too. That is what makes Clio’s confusion feel earned. Was she blocked by trauma? Was she gaslit by her father and sisters? Did the entity influence her memory? The uncomfortable answer is probably: yes, in pieces, all of it.

The exorcism section is one of the best parts because it reveals how unstable the book’s “truth” really is. Clio reads one version, then gets told that is not what happened. That does not make things clearer. It makes things worse. Because once the reader realizes even the big dramatic set pieces may be distorted, the whole novel becomes suspect in a good way.

The demon being described as bored is one of my favorite details. That makes it feel less like a religious evil and more like a parasitic intelligence. It wants attention. It wants a channel. It wants to poke, provoke, and watch people break. That connects perfectly to Clio’s influencer life, her family history, and the way every person in the book is performing some version of themselves.

The Austin relationship worked better than I expected too. I usually do not want heavy romance in horror, and this is not really that. It is more uncomfortable and more useful than romantic. Clio needs him. She uses him. He wants to be there for her. Somewhere inside that mess, something real might be forming. By the end, it feels like she may finally be learning to trust someone without turning it into a performance or a defense mechanism.

The ending is blurry, but I do not think that is a mistake. Clio sells the house, but the demon’s final status remains slippery. Is it gone? Is it still in the house? Did it attach itself to someone else? Is it with the stepfather? Is it with one of the sisters? The book does not fully nail that down, and I think that is intentional. The demon is not just a creature in a house. It is also attention, resentment, family damage, performance, and the stories people tell until those stories become real enough to live inside.

That is why the ending works for me. The house can be sold. The story can be closed. The family can try therapy. But whatever lived in that house was never just a thing in the walls. It was in the family system. It was in the memories. It was in the stories. It was in the need to be right, believed, loved, pitied, blamed, forgiven, or watched.

Bad Juju Blurb

A haunted house is bad enough. A haunted family is worse. Play Nice turns memory, grief, gaslighting, and sisterhood into one ugly little game the demon never wants to stop playing.