Excerpts Horror Read an Excerpt From Play Nice by Rachel Harrison A woman must confront the demons of her past when she attempts to fix up her childhood home… By Rachel Harrison | Published on September 8, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Play Nice by Rachel Harrison, a new take on the haunted house novel publishing with Berkley on September 9. 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 her 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. It’s exactly as I remembered it. The long driveway sneaking off the cul-de-sac. It needs to be paved; it’s needed to be paved for the last twenty years. The house is set back, surrounded by woods. The front lawn is pale and patchy, covered in dead leaves and twigs. I park and step outside. It’s chilly, and I’m grateful for the hoodie and to whomever it once belonged. The roof is all angles, which gives the house character, I think. There’s a tall brick chimney that runs along the side. A working fireplace—another feature. The siding is an ugly rusty red, which doesn’t exactly help with the house’s reputation as a demon lair. But paint it white or a dark navy, and suddenly it’s chic and modern instead of evil and dated. I dig the key out of my bag and watch my step as I head up the stone path toward the house. The pavers have sunk into the earth, thick moss between them. It’s the smell of the rickety wooden stairs that lead to the front door that gets me, that resurrects a sentimentality, a nostalgia, that I didn’t know I had. It’s such a distinct scent, these stairs. I’m surprised they haven’t collapsed by now. There are parts of these stairs in me and my sisters. Parts of the back deck, too. Splinters we couldn’t dig out, that we gave up on, impatient after sitting for too long on the bathroom floor with tweezers and a flashlight. This is a reunion. I get to the top of the steps, slip the key into the lock, and twist. The landing is brick, but not nice brick. Loose chipped brick. There are carpeted stairs that lead down to a hall, off that hall a bathroom, my old room, Mom’s room, and the garage. There are also carpeted stairs that lead up to the living room, kitchen, Mom’s office, the second bathroom, a linen closet, and then Leda and Daphne’s room. As expected, the carpet hasn’t been replaced—the gross beige shag persists. The wall to the left is wood paneled, all the way up to the cathedral ceiling. To the right are vertical wood posts that leave the space open, allow a peek into the living room from the stairs. My sisters and I used to have fun weaving in and out of these posts, jumping down onto the landing, until Daphne sprained her ankle and ruined it for us. The wood paneling is, unfortunately, orange-toned, but the wooden posts are a darker stain, along with the wooden beams that cross the high ceiling. Buy the Book Play Nice Rachel Harrison Buy Book Play Nice Rachel Harrison Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget I hold on to the banister, black wrought iron, not totally ugly but not ideal, and make my way to the top of the stairs. There’s barely any furniture. A beat-up leather couch set in front of the clunky brick fireplace, a round glass dining table with three old cane chairs over by the tacky saloon doors to the kitchen. The table is a relic from our time here. The couch is a relic from the sad back room of some discount furniture store, probably. The ceiling fan hangs low, big blades like the propellers of a jet. I stare up at it. And I watch as it slowly starts to spin. I swallow. Something hot and dense squeezes down my throat, landing heavily in my gut. Fear? Dread? The feeling has yet to crystallize, to reach its final form. The blades travel at a lazy cadence. Did I accidentally hit a switch? Is it just the circulation of air in the house stirring the fan? There’s a breeze coming in from somewhere. It’s here, stroking the back of my neck. I turn around and walk over to the wood posts, peek down into the foyer. I left the front door open. I’m tempted to shimmy through the posts and jump down onto the landing for old times’ sake, but I don’t have rubber kid knees anymore, I have prematurely achy former dancer knees, so I go around, down the stairs, and close the door. I listen to make sure I hear it latch, then turn to lean back against it, rest my head, take a moment to think. The carpet needs to go, needs to be replaced with hardwood or quality vinyl. The brick replaced with tile. The ceiling beams can stay, but the paneling can’t. I could keep it mid-century, incorporate some funky retro accent pieces. Go for a neutral color palette. Use mirrors to make it seem bigger, brighter. I head downstairs to visit my old bedroom and check out the state of the lower level. It’s dark. I feel around the wall for the light switch. The fixture on the ceiling above me flickers on, the bulb humming. Every door down here is shut, the framed artwork knocked off the walls, and there are muddy footprints on the carpet. They lead to my room. I lean down and run my hands over the footprints. The mud is dried, crusty. They appear to have been left by bulky man boots. Could belong to Roy or the paramedics or the coroner or whatever. No one offered up any other details about Mom’s death, and I don’t really care to know. She had a massive heart attack. She called 911. She died before they got here. Any specifics beyond that aren’t for me; they’re for the kind of morbid weirdos who look at photos of dead celebrities on TMZ or spend their lives on true crime forums obsessing over blood spatter. I’m curious, but not curious like that. Dead is dead. One thing I do know now, whether I want to or not, is that she clearly died in my room. I follow the footprints there and open the door. Someone left the light on. There’s my twin bed, in the corner, with my pink floral sheets. Unmade. The bed is unmade. “Did she die in my bed?” I ask aloud to no one. It would make sense, why Leda and Daphne and Helen would choose to omit that particular detail. A squeaking interrupts my train of thought. I pivot, chasing the sound. I listen, but it’s gone. Now I face my double dresser. My closet. The dreaded closet. My hot pink beanbag chair is opposite the closet, under a lamp that looks like a giant tulip, and there are books and magazines piled up beside it. Pictures I cut out of those magazines are tacked to the walls, along with some drawings I made at school and photos from disposable cameras. She left it the same. It’s a bug in amber. A time capsule. The lone window is in a weird spot between the bed and the beanbag chair, too high on the wall inside and too low to the ground outside to let in decent light. It’s covered by a white lace curtain that Mom made from her wedding dress. There’s a matching one in Leda and Daphne’s room upstairs. I approach the bed, study the impression in the covers, the curve of the sheets, the shape made by her, the shape she left in her absence. If I believed in ghosts, I’d wonder if hers was lying there. Another squeak. I whip around, not sure where it’s coming from. I hold my breath. Wait. Stay completely still. There’s nothing but quiet. When I turn back toward the bed, I notice there’s a book on the nightstand. One I’ve never read, that never belonged to me when I lived in this house. I pick it up and realize it’s torn along the spine; the binding fragile. There’s no back cover, nothing past page 137. Part of it is missing. I open it, and another page comes loose, fluttering to the floor. It’s falling apart in my hands. I’m about to look around for the rest of the book when I see it. A flash of writing in blue pen. There’s a handwritten note on the title page. For my Clio—My troublemaker. My fireball. May you always be brave.Don’t ever let anyone extinguish your light. I hope this helps you understand. Love forever,Mom I trace my fingers over her words. I forgot her perfect handwriting, the beautiful loops of it. I continue to flip through the book gently, careful not to damage what’s left. There are notes on almost every page. She annotated this copy. Annotated it for me. When? This thing is beat to hell. Did she leave it here for me to find? Did she know she was about to die? Squeak! There’s movement. A flash of fur. I’m screaming before my mind catches up, before my brain comprehends there’s a mouse scurrying across the top of my sneakers. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” I kick my feet and run. Down the hall, up the stairs, to the landing, wishing I hadn’t shut the door only a few minutes ago because now I’m fumbling to get it open, to dash through it and escape mouse house. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the ceiling fan in the living room spinning fast, like it’s caught in a hurricane. I turn toward it, and it stops. Suddenly, all on its own. Unless it wasn’t spinning at all, and I imagined it. Unless I didn’t see what I thought I saw. I stand staring, arrested by confusion. A blood-freezing cold grabs me by the back of the neck. Icy fingers press hard into my skin with the promise of bruises. I shake, throw my hands up, spin around. There’s no one, nothing, but it doesn’t matter, because I still feel that terrible chill on my neck and in my bones. Feel little mice crawling all over me, their claws scoring my skin. What I don’t feel is alone. I don’t feel like I’m alone in the house. Excerpted from Play Nice by Rachel Harrison, published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Play Nice</i> by Rachel Harrison appeared first on Reactor.