This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix.
A couple months ago, I finally got the haunted house tattoo I'd been wanting for a while — a line-drawing of a Victorian home vaguely modeled after the house in
Hausu with two windows that glow red. I booked my appointment with an artist that I knew loved horror movies, so we spent that hour talking through our recent favorites (
Barbarian,
Pearl, etc).
Toward the end, the artist mentioned a friend of hers who worked in real estate, and the hypothetical problem of “how do you sell a house that’s haunted?” To which I excitedly responded: “Have you heard about the newest Grady Hendrix?” She hadn’t, but she had read Hendrix before, so we settled into that hypothetical question: what if there were ghosts clogging up a home that you really needed to off-load?
What if there were ghosts clogging up a home that you really needed to off-load?
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(Personally, as a buyer? In this market? Ghosts aren’t a deal-breaker.)
Grady Hendrix’s latest horror,
How to Sell a Haunted House, takes this question and runs with it. And when I say “runs with it,” I mean,
full-tilt, get-out-of-my-way, I’m-going-too-fast-to-stop runs.
After Louise’s parents die in a tragic car accident, she flies home to deal with the house they left behind. But things don’t come easy: her relationship with her brother, Mark, is barbed with decade-old grudges and resentments; her parent’s house is filled with creepy puppets who refuse to be thrown away; and the wills her parents left behind aren't as clear-cut as she’d hoped. Things are messy, but then they get tangled and horrifying and all of the baggage Louise has tried to stuff down over the years tumbles out in a ferocious series of confrontations with an increasingly horrifying threat.
I’m purposefully trying to be vague, because I’d hate to ruin any of this book for you. There was so much of it that I didn’t see coming. Hendrix does a great job writing characters that find themselves in circumstances they can’t explain or understand but still have to somehow face. How do you fight off something you have a hard time believing in? Your imagination is supposed to be beautiful, not lethal.
How do you fight off something you have a hard time believing in?
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In my opinion, the best horror works because of its dark and blistered-but-still-beating heart, and the blistered heart of
How to Sell a Haunted House is the relationship between Louise and Mark and their shared but still distinct grief over the loss of their parents. One of the reasons I love horror as much as I do is because it gives the reader access to the complications and horrors of grief, in all of its particularities — something that Hendrix clearly understands.
Which is all to say that this book made me cry! I didn’t see it coming, but I cried. Goldarn you, Grady Hendrix.
Reader beware, though: once you read this book, you’ll never look at a puppet the same way again.