Grady Hendrix’s How to Sell a Haunted House is an intense, cinematic, and comedic horror thriller. After her parents are tragically killed in a car accident, Louise Joyner flies back to her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina to handle their funeral arrangements and tend to their estate. She reluctantly leaves her five-year-old daughter Poppy with her ex, Poppy’s father, promising to return to San Francisco as soon as she can. Louise is rattled by the loss of her parents and dreading the inevitable showdown with her estranged younger brother Mark once she sets foot in her old neighborhood of Mt. Pleasant. Since their teens, Mark and Louise have been perpetually at odds and each has always felt that the other was unfairly favored by their parents. The last time they actually enjoyed being in each other’s company was when they were kids, sitting together enraptured while listening to their mother Nancy tell her many bedtime stories with the help of her army of handcrafted puppets and dolls, a collection which filled every available surface of their house.

Louise’s expectations of a warm, heartfelt reunion with her brother are low, but she’s resolved to remain calm and civil in Mark’s presence. She intends to split whatever inheritance she receives in their parents’ wills fifty-fifty with Mark, clear out their childhood home, put the house on the market, and use the proceeds from the sale to save up for Poppy’s future. Of course, things do not go exactly as Louise plans when Mark has other ideas about the property and their parents’ wishes, and all semblance of civility and maturity swiftly devolves between the siblings.

With the added stress and pressures of arranging their parents’ joint funeral and managing all of the paperwork, disposal, cleaning, and organizing that selling the house entails, Louise and Mark regress to their childhood roles of unwilling antagonists. They vex one another, push each other’s buttons, and verbally and physically spar with each other. For much of the book’s first half, they’re both aggrieved and misunderstood—each alienated in their grief and their contrasting perceptions of their childhoods and unequal upbringings.

The first half of the novel is anchored in a realism that establishes the straightforward, yet fraught history of the Joyner siblings and their “weird family,” as their cousin and realtor Mercy calls them. However, an eerie and unsettling undercurrent hangs over Mark and Louise’s every encounter with the now uninhabited Joyner residence: strange occurrences, like dolls and puppets that seem to move on their own at different times. Although similarly unnerved by the “bad vibes” in the house that Mark senses, Louise decides to ignore those feelings and instead stay focused on her objective of quickly resolving her family’s business so she can return to her home and daughter in San Francisco.

When the tension ratchets up and all signs point to a haunting in the second half, Louise and Mark must learn to trust their instincts and each other to both unravel the family secrets and combat the malevolent force that threatens every generation of their family. 

The first half of the book is much slower in pace than the second half; it sluggishly plods along, much like the siblings’ dragging feet in their dealings with their family’s affairs. After the crucial turning point, the pace accelerates with the level of terror, as the plot increasingly ventures into territory untethered from the familiar and explicable. Hendrix’s trademark winking humor appears here, though not in as much abundance as in some of his earlier titles. While there are plenty of bizarre and laughable moments, there’s a solemnity to proceedings that makes the humor seem more subdued. This is Hendrix’s most terrifying title to date.

LOGLINE: While preparing to sell their childhood home after their parents’ sudden death, estranged adult siblings Louise and Mark Joyner are forced to confront their individual experiences of grief, disparate memories of their unusual shared past, and a sinister force lurking within the walls of their parents’ puppet-filled house.  

MOOD: Poignant, funny, and utterly creepy. Absurdity mixed with a thick layer of dread. How to Sell a Haunted House delivers the grounded and recognizable pangs of sibling rivalry, parental favoritism, family secrets, and the long and complex process of grief filtered through an extraordinary paranormal tale of intergenerational trauma, evil puppets, and haunted houses.   

TITLE: How to Sell a Haunted House

AUTHOR: Grady Hendrix

GENRE: Horror, Domestic Horror, Psychological Suspense, Family Drama, Gothic Thriller, Comedy

LENGTH: 432 pages

PUBLISHER: Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Random House

PUB DATE: 17 January 2023