How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix
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How to Sell a Haunted House
By Grady Hendrix
Berkeley 2023
How to Sell a Haunted House is the newest release from horror author Grady Hendrix. The book follows Louise Joyner as she travels back home to Charleston from San Francisco to deal with the aftermath of her parents’ sudden death in a car accident. She is forced to work with her younger brother Mark whom she—in the great tradition of older siblings who look down on their younger siblings—absolutely cannot stand. Louise and Mark must find a way to get along as they decide how to handle their parents’ assets. And of course, there’s this tiny problem of their parents’ house being haunted.
Like the author’s other two books set in Charleston—My Best Friend’s Exorcism and The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires—How to Sell a Haunted House is first and foremost a novel about people. When the novel opens, Louise and Mark have a very strained relationship. Louise feels as though her brother has never been held to the same standards, seeing them as complete opposites:
She won awards. Mark struggled through high school. She got a master’s in design. Mark dropped out of college his freshman year. She built products that people used every day, including part of the user interface for the latest interation of the iPhone. He was on a mission to get fired from every bar in Charleston.
In Louise’s opinion, Mark is flighty and noncommital, especially in contrast to her seemingly stable life in San Francisco where she works in the tech industry and raises her young daughter. When the two siblings are reunited, they clash in all the ways readers might expect such polar opposites to clash. The tension is palpable each time the siblings interact. And disagreeing about what’s to be done with their parents’ estate is only the beginning as it is soon revealed that Louise and Mark remember their childhoods very differently.
Grady Hendrix has a knack for creating characters who feel like real people, which extends to the secondary and tertiary characters in the novel. From Aunt Gail, who just so happens to have some experience exorcizing ghosts, naturally, to Mark’s friends at the “radical puppet collective,” each character has distinct personality traits and behaviors. Louise’s family members back in Charleston are just as well-drawn as the main characters. The world feels lived-in, populated with real people who have their own real lives.
How to Sell a Haunted House is a story about people grappling with death; dealing with grief and everything that entails. The book is broken up into four sections titled after different stages of grief, and readers see Louise and Mark moving through the grieving process in their own individual ways. It is also about generational trauma, secrets, and lies. That is the true heart of this book, two siblings grappling with the loss of their parents and trudging—sometimes unwillingly—through revelations about their past and their family.
It may seem odd that in a review about a horror book there’s been very little mention of horror. That’s because this book is primarily a character-focused story, but it is wrapped in a horror package. That package takes the shape of tons and tons of creepy dolls and puppets. Louise and Mark’s childhood home is filled to the rafters with them:
Clown dolls on top of the sofa, a Harlequin wedged against one of its arms, German Dolly-Faced Dolls crowded a shelf over their heads, a swarm of dolls stared through the glass doors of the doll cabinet against the far wall. On top of the doll cabinet stood a diaorama of three taxidermied squirrels. The TV played the Home Shopping Network to two enormous French Bébé dolls sitting side by side in her dad’s brown velour easy chair.
Their mother Nancy was a collector. She was also the owner of a Christian puppet ministry. It should be no surprise then that when things do take a turn for the spooky, Nancy’s collection is at the center of things. But How to Sell a Haunted House is not interested in scaring readers just for the sake of it. The horror elements of the book are used specifically to enhance character development and help propel the plot forward toward the end, but the horror is not, in and of itself, the plot.
How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix is on the tamer side as far as horror books go, but what it lacks in over-the-top thrills and chills it makes up for in satisfying character work. The heart of the story is really the relationship between Louise and Mark and how they navigate this exaggerated version of an event that families deal with every day.
Amberlee Venters is a freelance editor and writer living in Northern California.