Welcome to another installment of 31 Days of Halloween! This is our chance to set the mood for the spookiest and scariest month of the year as we focus our attention on horror and Halloween fun. For the month of October we’ll be sharing various pieces of underappreciated scary books, comics, movies, and television to help keep you terrified and entertained all the way up to Halloween.
I’ve been a huge fan of Grady Hendrix ever since discovering his 2016 novel My Best Friend’s Exorcism. Since then, nearly every book of his that I’ve read has been an impossible mix of poignant, hilarious, and terrifying. He also happens to have grown up where I currently live, which causes his work to affect me even more — sometimes to an uncomfortable degree. There’s nothing like discovering that a character being tortured by a demon lives within 100 yards of your home address.
We’ll see if Prime Video did the source material justice with their film adaptation of My Best Friend’s Exorcism. Today, however, we’re taking an advance look at Hendrix’s upcoming novel How to Sell a Haunted House, which releases on January 17, 2023.
This review will be mostly spoiler-free. If you decide to turn back now, though, I won’t haunt and terrorize you like what happens to the main characters in this story.
What’s It About?
Here’s the publisher’s description, emphasis mine:
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.
Mostly, 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. But 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.
Some houses don’t want to be sold, and their home has other plans for both of them…
The only issue I have with this summary is that it sounds like Louise and Mark are about to embark on an odd couple adventure filled with supernatural hijinks and real estate calamities. While How to Sell a Haunted House definitely has a real estate angle that plays into things, the story is far more powerful and terrifying than what you’re being told.
The book also appears to be leaning on a horror cliche by using puppets. That was my first assumption too until it was completely blown out of the water.
What Works
Don’t get me wrong — if you’re reading a ghost story that takes place inside a house filled with puppets (along with some small taxidermied animals), then you know that they have to come to life. In this book, it’s why they come to life and what they do that made me physically squirm during some passages.
There’s also another supernatural element that’s set up beautifully while still managing to be a complete surprise. Its appearance is the sort of moment that makes you audibly gasp and/or swear out loud before diving back in to see what sort of awfulness is about to happen.
Combine all that with Hendrix’s gloriously descriptive language, and you might also find yourself gritting your teeth and turning on a few nearby lights for comfort.
In the middle of all this, there’s some brilliant character work centered around Louise and how she interacts with her family during a devastating crisis. Mark starts off as a cartoonishly unlikable foil, but somehow transforms into a sympathetic lead without ever betraying his flawed identity. The siblings’ stories allow them to demonstrate multiple ways that people deal with grief…and how that process is excruciatingly similar no matter how different those people are.
There’s also plenty of humor to be found, although it never detracts from the narrative’s heavier/scarier moments.
What Doesn’t Work
As good as the whole book is, it takes a while for the horror to happen. There’s a ton of good stuff in that opening act, but it could frustrate folks who were expecting a wall-to-wall scare fest. That said, once the horror gets going, it never lets up.
Unfortunately, a couple of passages in the second act are so good that they nearly overshadow the rest of the story. The ending isn’t bad by any stretch. In fact, it’s one of the best I’ve read from a horror novel in a while. But the final act never matches the intensity that preceded it.
The Verdict
Unlike most of Grady Hendrix’s work, How to Sell a Haunted House is not based on a particularly unique or quirky premise. It had every chance to be ordinary, but utilized its tropes to tell a story that’s as powerful as it is terrifying. I still consider My Best Friend’s Exorcism and The Final Girl Support Group to be my favorite Hendrix Novels, but this is a very close third.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go make sure my future son’s nursery doesn’t have any puppets lurking near the crib.
Preorder ‘House to Sell a Haunted House’ by Grady Hendrix here.
Read our interview with Grady Hendrix about ‘The Final Girl Support Group’ (and horror in general) here.
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