Play Nice

By: Rachel Harrison

A woman must confront the demons of her past when she attempts to fix up her childhood home in this devilishly clever take on the haunted house novel from the USA Today bestselling author of Black Sheep and So Thirsty.

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 parents' 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, a sinister presence in the house manifests, revealing ugly truths that threaten to shake Clio’s beautiful life to its very foundation.

©2025 Rachel Harrison (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"Play Nice packs a prickly punch by cleverly nesting its possession story within another kind of familial and familiar possession. While the demon at the center of it all terrorizes the women in Clio's family when they are most vulnerable, the book is scary because there's more than one kind of demon."—Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie and The Cabin at the End of the World

"Play Nice is an exorcism of a haunted heart—a singular, obsessive, and deeply palpable examination of the wounds we mend from the trauma, the excruciating cruelty we inherit from our loved ones. Harrison deftly balances between moments of quiet, poignant reflection and unhinged brutality in this eerie shocker about possession, family, and secrets. An impressive and equally unforgettable work, Rachel Harrison is the new Queen of Horror."—Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

"To call Play Nice Rachel Harrison’s scariest book yet is to perhaps risk downplaying how it’s also as deft and gripping a guessing game about literal and metaphorical demons as A Head Full of Ghosts or The Haunting of Hill House. Yes, this book is just that good. But it’s also scary as hell."—Nat Cassidy, author of Mary and When the Wolf Comes Home