{Book Review} How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

Ghosts and sadness go hand in hand. That’s just good horror common sense. After all, what is a ghost but the past unburied, magically brought back to life? And what is grief but our traumatic reaction to our present becoming past?

Ultimately, Grady Hendrix makes grief the basis of his latest novel, How to Sell a Haunted House. In particular, Hendrix tells his story of grief by focusing on a duo of troubled siblings, Louise and Mark Joyner. When their parents die in a car accident, the duo’s protagonist, Louise, dreads dealing with a house full of dolls and dolls, her deadly brother and, more importantly, a world after her parents have left. However, her problems soon grow worse than simple sibling rivalry. Something is waiting in the house for both Mark and Louise. Something not so keen on one of the siblings selling the house and moving on.

In many ways, Hendrix’s haunted house story plays with some pretty well-worn tropes. Scary dolls and marionettes? Check. Repressed memories? Check. Generation trauma? Check. What makes How to Sell a Haunted House distinguishing it from other haunted house dishes lies mainly in its depiction of the family.

Louise and Mark are by far the best developed characters in the book. They really stand out in this work, mainly because of how real they feel. Neither of them are particularly likeable people, which is why they work. Instead, both Louise and Mark express a selfishness and self-centeredness that feels remarkably true given their circumstances and their trauma.

One of the best indicators of these shortcomings comes out in an early scene with Louise and her daughter Poppy. Shortly after receiving the news of her family’s death, Louise contemplates what she might do best if she tells her daughter. As Hendrix writes:

Louise’s mother also had a pathological inability to talk about death. When their Uncle Arthur had a heart attack and drove his lawnmower through a greenhouse, she had told Mark and Louise that she and their father were going on vacation to Myrtle Beach, then parked them with Aunt Honey. When Sue Estes’ older sister died of leukemia in fifth grade, her mother had told Louise she was too young to go to the funeral. Her friendship with Sue was never the same after that…

When Louise got Poppy, she promised to be honest about death. She knew that stating the facts clearly would be the best way for Poppy to understand that death was part of life. She would answer all of Poppy’s questions with absolute honesty, and if she didn’t know something, they would work out the answer together.

Of course, when Louise decides to tell Poppy the blunt truth about her grandparents passing, it only traumatizes the poor girl in a different way than Louise remembers from her own life. Louise consistently responds to conflict and distress by assuming that her own solutions must be the only correct and practical ones. It’s a very easy way of thinking for many people, and it’s all too common when experiencing something as trembling as the death of a family member.

Her brother, Mark, on the other hand, often chooses to run away from problems when they become too much. His mother has a hamster problem with the many dolls and puppets she has made over the course of her life. Well, it’s time to call a cleanup company without saying a word to the rest of the family! A haunted house? Let’s lie about it and just sell it before we can fix the problem for too long. The puppets and puppets are starting to look a lot more active than they should be? It’s time to get out on bail. However, cowardly and selfish as he is, Mark’s personality also makes sense in a family that refuses to confront the trauma of the past. After all, are you really doing something wrong if this is the pattern set by every adult in your life? Especially if it seems to work?

Until, of course, the problem becomes too big to solve by insisting that only your own reality is true or by running away.

The other great strength of the book lies in its antagonist. Of all the spooky ghost dolls in the book, Pupkin is the strongest personality, a strange and terrifying wool clown doll. He is an example of the popphobe’s worst nightmare. Speaking with the vocabulary of a rambunctious and innocent child, Pupkin terrorizes our protagonists with a violent streak large enough to make Chucky look tame. Hendrix highlights the inherent horror of puppetry through Pupkin’s story. This connection between possession, lack of agency, and the act of ventriloquism makes for some of the book’s most terrifying passages. Some readers might argue that these connections are not new to horror storytelling. However, Hendrix’s decision to make the haunting ramifications of puppetry resonate with the theme of a family history pulling the strings makes for an emotionally satisfying story.

If How to Sell a Haunted House has a weakness, it is in the predictability. At some point in the story, you realize how the rest of the story will be spun. Indeed, after reaching that point, many of the predictions I made while reading came true. This is especially true if you have a decent understanding of subgenre conventions. In that sense, the novel feels satisfying but not revealing. Haunted houses and dolls are some of the most common tropes in horror stories. At some point, it becomes exceptionally difficult to twist the story in a way that people have never seen before.

Nevertheless, the novel offers at least complete characters and a well-executed variation on the ghost puppet. How to Sell works especially well when we think about the holiday season full of uncompromising and difficult family members. What better catharsis than to beat up an evil puppet?

Related