How To Sell A Haunted House by Grady Hendrix
(Format used for this read: Audiobook)
When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn’t want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn’t want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father’s academic career and her mother’s lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn’t want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world.
Most of all, she doesn’t want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success. Unfortunately, she’ll need his help to get the house ready for sale because it’ll take more than some new paint on the walls and clearing out a lifetime of memories to get this place on the market.
But some houses don’t want to be sold, and their home has other plans for both of them…
This is the 4th book written by Grady Hendrix that I have indulged in recently….two I enjoyed GREATLY (The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires and My Best Friend’s Exorcism) and one I did NOT enjoy greatly (Horrorstor).
Yall can go find my reviews for those not too far ahead of this one if ya wanna know my thoughts on them all!
I wasn’t quite sure where this one was gonna land…. it was my last read of official spooky season.
So I figured a book about a haunted house was a sure fire way to round out my creeptastic literary jaunt this Halloween era.
Happy to report to yall that this one was MUCH better than the last book of his I read….and I did enjoy this one greatly.
It was CREEPY AF, yall.
For one solitary reason.
Puppets and dolls.
Legit.
Every little kid’s best day dream is envisioning their toys come to life….but it’s also every little kid’s worst nightmare as well.
This story absolutely plays on that, my friends.
There’s all kinds of shit going on in Louise and Mark’s dead parents house…and without giving away too much about the story, I’ll just tell yall it involves puppets and dolls.
Aren’t we all a bit weirded out by dolls in large quantities? A massive wall of dolls is NOT what you want to walk into in the middle of the night when you hear a weird noise, am I right?
While I was reading this book, I was reminded of my own creepy doll situation in the house I grew up in.
My mom (and maybe my older sister?) collected these fancy “display only” dolls called Madame Alexander dolls.
I never liked those dolls for a few reasons….
One was that I wasn’t allowed to play with them…they were for looking at ONLY. That made zero sense to me as a child (and still does as an adult really)….what is the purpose of having a doll if all you do is STARE at her? They are made to be PLAYED WITH!
Two was that they had these weird AF blinking eyes that I swear followed you as you walked across a room.
Plus, they were displayed on this odd mirrored display ledge over the top of our old piano (gotta love some 1980s decorating) and every single time we practiced playing music, the dolls would shake a little bit….and their eyes would blink furiously.
UGGGHHH. Yall, it was just as eerie as it sounds!
Stories about dolls or stuffed animals or just toys in general is not a new premise for a story…it’s been done MANY MANY times.
But it WORKS….
Because we *all* have envisioned it and we *all* totes get the heebie jeebies when we think about it!
This was a spooky ass story, but also there was some interesting underlying commentary on loss, greif, family secrets, damaged relationships, and the effects of untreated and undealt with trauma, both personally and generationally.
There was even a smidge of commentary on the Christian church too.
Lemme tell yall when the story started talking about puppet ministry, it gave me INSTANT chills.
Back in my church going days a few years ago, we actually did attend a Methodist church that HAD a puppet ministry, yall.
It creeped us the EFF OUT every dang time they performed on a Sunday morning…I don’t know if it was the odd yarn hair or the giant unmoving eyes or what it was, but I hated those services SO VERY MUCH.
Anyway…there is a twist towards the end of the book that took the story in a completely different spin that I expected it to…and I thought it was terrific. I loved how he ended it all!
I finished listening to this book today and I think it was the perfect thing to finish up on Halloween…the perfect finish to my scare fest of reads for Halloween season 2023.
I do recommend this book—
Although, it was NOT the best choice to listen to while I was cleaning house today ….when I got to my younger kids room–who is obsessed with stuffed animals–I rushed as fast as I could to get that shit vaccummed and straightened…I minimized by contact with as many toys as I possibly could and did NOT make eye contact with any of them🤣