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 parent’s 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 Alex 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, the presence in the house becomes more real, and more sinister, revealing ugly truths that threaten to shake Clio’s beautiful life to its very foundation.

This book contains scenes depicting self harm.

I’ve inherited many things from my mother: red hair, bookworm tendencies, an appreciation for Old Hollywood movies, and a passionate fondness for chocolate peanut butter ice cream. Luckily, unlike the protagonist of Rachel Harrison’s brilliant new horror novel Play Nice, I have not inherited a homicidal family demon. Thanks, Mom!

Play Nice follows Gen Z influencer Clio to her childhood home, recently bequeathed to her by her dead mother. After her parents’ bitter divorce, Clio grew up believing that her mom was unreliable, volatile, and mentally unstable. But the more time she spends renovating the home she barely remembers, the more she begins to wonder if her supposedly crazy mother might have been experiencing something all too real…

This book has everything I like in a horror novel: chilling moments of danger, a razor-sharp storyline I couldn’t stop thinking about, and a delightfully terrifying demon (or is it just a hallucination?) with a diabolical sense of humor. Whether you’re a longstanding horror fan or are venturing into the genre for the first time, I can’t recommend this one highly enough.