How to Sell a Haunted House by horror novelist Grady Hendrix (The Final Girl Support Group; We Sold Our Souls; Horrorstör) is a hilarious, horrifying and surprisingly tender take on a good old-fashioned haunted house tale. After her loving parents die suddenly in a car wreck, single mom Louise knows she has to return to Charleston. But going home means facing her deadbeat younger brother, Mark, who's hated her for years; her eccentric extended family; and some terrifying childhood memories that she prefers to keep buried. It also means having to go through the hoards of creepy puppets her mother made. Although Louise and Mark are eager to sell the place, even if it means working together, the house and all its current residents, marionettes and ghosts alike, have other plans.
As in his other horror novels, Hendrix imbues How to Sell a Haunted House with his trademark dark comedy, simultaneously spoofing and honoring classic horror tropes. Readers will both snort over Louise's Southern, hyper-Christian aunt turned demon hunter and cringe at the visceral horror of needles slipping into eyeballs. But more than gross-out horror, this novel captures the creeping, eerie atmosphere of classic haunted house stories--from the blue flickering lights of televisions left on in empty rooms to the spine-chilling scraping noises of things that go bump in the night. Even more than Hendrix's previous works, this novel finds the heart-wrenching core of its central trope, developing its characters to serve as emotional support beams for a story structured on family legacies of both loss and love. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor