[BOOKS OF THE DEAD] How to Sell A Haunted House - Grady Hendrix
- Victoria
- Aug 10
- 6 min read
Updated: Sep 28
How to Sell A Haunted House - Books of the Dead Review
Welcome to Books of the Dead. A monthly series by published author and founder of The Readers in the Rue Morgue Book Club Victoria Brown where she deep dives into some her favourite (and not so favourite) authors and books.
Author: Grady Hendrix
Publication Date: 17/01/2023
Synopsis: Grady Hendrix takes on the haunted house in a thrilling new novel that explores the way your past—and your family—can haunt you like nothing else. 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…
Thoughts:
Horror’s affiliation with death has made it the ideal genre through which to explore grief, and that is exactly what Grady Hendrix does in his 2023 novel ‘How to Sell a Haunted House’.
Horror novels and films using creatures, monsters, and horrendous acts as metaphors for grief has become something of an in-joke within the horror-loving community (looking at you The Babadook and Hereditary), but Hendrix makes it work in this novel because he keeps the schlocky, 80s camp style horror in mind throughout by using a puppet as his creature of choice. It’s like R.L. Stine’s Slappy the Dummy for adults, with lots of grief and trauma sprinkled in for good measure. Before we dive into ‘How to Sell a Haunted House’, let’s take a look at its author.
Grady Hendrix is a prolific author, journalist, screenwriter and public speaker from South Carolina, USA. His experience with the American Society for Physical Research and in-depth knowledge of horror literature, as demonstrated by his Stoker Award-winning, non-fiction work ‘Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ‘70s and ‘80s Horror Fiction’, arguably informs much of his fiction, which includes ‘My Best Friend’s Exorcism’, ‘The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires’, ‘The Final Girls Support Group’, ‘We Sold Our Souls' and ‘Horrorstor’. He is also ‘very, very beautiful’ – his words, not mine.
His work has been praised by readers for appealing to their gory sense of horror while balancing it with the complex emotions that accompany these kinds of stories, should an author choose to explore it. Some don’t. Sometimes a horror book is just blood and guts and that’s exactly what you want. Other times though, you want some emotional depth, and a little bit of humour, and that’s what Grady excels at.
Grady wrote ‘How to Sell a Haunted House’ during the Covid-19 pandemic. Reflecting on the book at the time, he said: "Whether it's around a campfire, at a sleepover, or alone by ourselves on the couch, there's nothing more comforting than a haunted house story". And it’s true. We know the set-up; we know the tropes. It’s familiar. It’s, ironically, safe. There is no shortage of haunted house novels; ‘The Haunting of Hill House’, ‘The Amityville Horror’, ‘Hell House’ and ‘Burnt Offerings’ are just a few that come to mind. So what makes Grady’s stand out?
It's not the dysfunctional family dynamics and the trauma that accompanies these family members into adulthood; this is pretty much a compulsory part of haunted house stories. It’s not grief, though it is explored exceedingly well in this book, especially through Grady’s choice to split the narrative into the five stages of grief. Let’s be real. What makes this book stand out is the creepy puppet.
Louise and Mark, our two protagonists, had weird, eclectic parents. Their mother was a puppeteer who put on shows and crafted her own puppets, even going as far as to make puppet versions of her own children (no thank you). The puppet antagonist in this book is called Pupkin. He is described as being ‘a red-and-yellow glove puppet with two stumpy fabric legs dangling from his front and two little nubbin arms’. He has a ‘chalk-white plastic face’ with a ‘big smiling mouth and a little pug nose, and he looked out of the corners of his wide eyes like he was up to some kind of mischief’. Pupkin was Louise and Mark’s mother’s favourite creation. She took him everywhere, used him to tell Bible stories to children, ‘the one she’d learned ventriloquism for, the one who told Mark and Louise bedtime stories, the one who had been in [their mother’s] life before them…. The one who made Louise’s skin crawl. The one she hated most.’
Beyond the literal terror and physical harm Pupkin inflicts on Louise and Mark as they try to work through their tense sibling relationship and the loss of their parents (no spoilers as to who or what Pupkin really is), puppets can be genuinely creepy. They can invoke feelings of loss of control, powerlessness, futility. They can resurrect buried childhood memories of feeling vulnerable and unsafe. But it can go even deeper than that.
Puppets can invoke a feeling of the uncanny, a feeling that something is not quite right. A puppet looks human; it can walk and talk like a human (with the help of a puppeteer) but isn’t human. A puppet is a lifeless thing brought to life, something that shouldn’t appear alive. Ben Mars, a resident artist at the Puppet Palace notes that puppets ‘behave as if conscious, but that consciousness is particularly Other’. The Other, in this case, refers to what Julia Kristeva calls abjection, horror and terror that produces an overwhelming physical and emotional reaction from us. These reactions exist because the abjection we’re exposed to ignites an existential terror within us because it plays with the boundaries of the Self and the Other – the Self being us, our experiences, what we know, and the Other, something outside ourselves, unknowable, and therefore frightening and threatening to our sense of order. (The Fright Club NI also discusses the Other in horror in our article Boris Karloff as the “Other” in The Mummy).
While puppets arguably hark back to pre-historic humans who carved humanistic figurines out of clay and that, as toys, they can be a conduit for imagination and joy, this odd feeling of alienation caused by what our eyes see and what our minds perceive on a psychological, evolutionary level can be disorientating, prompting us to be cautious of this creature, if it is such a thing. Psychologist Frank McAndrew told the Smithsonian Magazine that ‘we shouldn’t be afraid of a little piece of plastic, but it’s sending out social signals. They look like people but aren’t people, so we don’t know how to respond to it, just like we don’t know how to respond when we don’t know whether there is a danger or not…the world in which we evolved, how we process information, there weren’t things like dolls.’
Hendrix blends this uncanny fear of puppets with campy, schlocky horror tinged with genuine trauma and grief that he has become so well known for. He manages to create real, authentic characters and put them in ridiculous situations that feel so real in the moment. His prose and pacing are so expertly crafted that you find yourself flying through his books like you did as a kid when you read R. L. Stine or Christopher Pike. The atmosphere is so tense you can almost feel it in your bones.
This book may not be as popular as ‘My Best Friend’s Exorcism’, ‘Horrorstor’, or ‘The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires’, but it’s not one to miss.
Verdict: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
-Victoria Brown, Author of The Death Ship: Recovering The Bodies of Titanic's Dead
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