Be warned: Spoilers, puppets and creepy dolls ahead.
Grady Hendrix’s How to Sell a Haunted House tell the story of two siblings, Louise and Mark, who come home to Charleston to take care of their parents’ estate after both their mother and father pass in a tragic car accident.
The story gripped me in the second chapter, when Mark calls Louise to inform her of their deaths, and he begins to regale her with a very gory description of the incident because he said ‘it helps to know the details.” His sister has only had seconds to process the loss of both parents and already he is telling her that. Wow, what an asshole, I thought. And then, I hope Grady kills him off by the end.
With that thought in mind, as Louise leaves her daughter and flies home to help younger brother, Mark, deal with the estate and sell the house, I began to think this was a story of sibling rivalry. I watched, through Louise’s eyes, as she returned to the house for the first time in years, as she witnessed her mother’s doll and puppet collection collecting dust and the house in disarray, as she reminisced to herself about her parents’ lives, her mother’s puppet ministry and her father’s Christmas stollen. I watched as she discovered a boarded up attic and indications that something in the house had gone wrong just before her parents’ car accident. Louise tells the reader about the way her brother dropped out of college, and meandered his way through bartending jobs, while the mom and dad supported and encouraged every failure he made. At this point, I was sure this was a book about sibling rivalry and the way our parents completely mess us up, intentionally or otherwise.
How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix. No creepy dolls in the photo because I don’t keep them in my house–like a sane person.
Then Grady pulled the strings of his puppets on the page and the story began to twist and the characters became real, the same way the puppets in the story begin to take on a life of their own. The story went from what I thought it was, what I wanted it to be—as a sister and a sibling—to something else. How to Sell a Haunted House is about so many things—how we only know our own sides of the story, the secrets people keep for good and bad reasons (and how those things can be one and the same), how a family’s way of telling stories can just be another way to lie. It’s about all those things, as well as grief and terror, evil dolls and murder puppets, and it’s got the aforementioned sibling rivalry and parental damage to boot.
Grady Hendrix manages to take a story about a couple of siblings and a house full of haunted dolls and puppets and add to it layer after layer, to make it true horror—something that strikes at our deepest fears of love, loss and grief, that is more than just a story of murdeous marionettes. This book
made me laugh, it brought me near tears, and it gave me the damn creeps. It’s also, easily, one of the best books I’ve read in the last year, in this genre of any other.