Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2025 October 10 • Friday

Lisa Tuttle’s Familiar Spirit starts with a bang, throwing the reader right into a demonic possession story in which there is no doubt about the evil supernatural stuff going on.

Then it almost immediately shifts to a haunted house narrative as the protagonist, Sarah, newly single and confused and vulnerable, moves into the out-of-the-way old house that was the setting for the first chapter’s burst of bloody horror.

Almost immediately Sarah is under attack from the demonic force but is strong enough to resist. Refreshingly, not only does Sarah immediately accept what’s happening, but so do her two best friends. There’s no dithering or arguing or trying to convince Sarah that her experience didn’t occur.

This novel doesn’t waste any time at all, actually, just zipping forward and presenting a seemingly insoluble problem. Sarah could just leave and never go back to the house again but it’s a sure thing that someone less able to fight back will end up there and be the demon’s victim. And Sarah will feel responsible for that.

So fight the demon and destroy it. Great, but how? Sarah and one of her friends take a deep dive into the occult and demonology and anything else that might be relevant and, now armed with knowledge of spells and symbols, return to the house ready for action.

But they’ve jumped to some conclusions on the way and those conclusions, while perfectly reasonable, turn out not to be correct. There are several surprises awaiting the reader, as well as a fair amount of sex and violence, including one particularly memorable scene with a jade figurine.

This was a great book. I remember liking Tuttle’s short-story collection, A Nest of Nightmares, and that same twisted and horrific sensibility is let out to play in this very successful longer form work.

The first line is “After a long while Valerie rose from her slumped, broken position like a puppet whose dangling strings have at last been gathered and pulled".