This New York Times Bestseller by horror writer Grady Hendrix mixes horror, grief, and family trauma with camp. According to my exhaustive—or exhausting—reading of reviews on Goodreads, most people either love it or think it’s the stupidest thing they’ve ever read. I fall somewhere between.
Plot:
Louise Joyner returns home to Charleston after her parents die in a car accident. She dreads returning home, but she looks forward to seeing family—some of them. Her brother Mark is not among those she wants to see, but she has little choice. Mark was their mother’s favorite—he had everything handed to him, whereas Louise had to work for everything. They paid for Mark to go to Boston University. When he dropped out under mirky circumstances, they let him come home. Her parents bought wood for a deck Mark promised to build. The wood remains piled in the backyard.
The house itself gives Louise pause. Of course, there are her mother’s many dolls and the puppets she handmade for her puppet ministry. She finds a hammer on the kitchen table. The entrance to the attic has been hastily boarded up. Why would her parents do that?
Mark has hired a de-cluttering service to empty their parents’ house without consulting Louise because Louise hung up on him. Louise immediately objects. The owner of the service, unwilling to get in the middle of a family argument, dismisses his workers and goes home. Louise and Mark continue fighting.
But the puppets—
Thoughts:
In some spots, the author was having fun. Fellow puppeteers attended the memorial for Louise and Mark’s parents in costume. Louise is appalled, but the family congratulates Mark on his arrangements, telling him it’s what their parents would have wanted.
When Louise later hears noises in the house, she at first puts them down to squirrels in the attics. That’s why her father blocked the attic entrance, right?
In addition to the absurd, Hendrix shows the reader absurd violence. The puppets beat Louise. Taxidermized squirrels from a creche (which is gross and weird) attack her. She wallops them with a tennis racket and throws them in a garbage can.
What happens to Louise pales in comparison to what Marks undergoes.
Further menace appears, threatening Louise’s five-year-old daughter, Poppy. This struck me as sad, but through Poppy’s danger, Louise stands up to her family and learns an ancient family secret.
This is not a book for everyone. I enjoyed it. I could have done without some of the gory parts. The characters are flawed but sympathetic. Even the slacker Mark turns out to have more depth than a simple spoiled never-do-well.
Title: How to Sell a Haunted House
Author: Grady Hendrix
First published: January 17, 2023
Reviews of Old and New Stories. Mostly Old 
Sounds interesting. Selling houses in any market comes with its quirks! LOL And the family dynamics after a parent dies are interesting.
Yes to all of the above. A friend of ours has just gone through all of this—without haunted puppets beating up on him, of course.
Sounds interesting, I suppose I’d read it if I came to posess it
It was interesting. But beyond that. Eh, My feelings are mixed.