Grady Hendrix is a big deal. His books regularly receive praise from both the young millennial TikTok crowd and legitimate literary circles. He has won the Stoker Award, regularly tops best-seller lists, and is one of the best voices in modern horror. It is no surprise, then, that “How to Sell a Haunted House” is another roaring success after just being released in January.
When designer and single mother Louise Joyner hears that her parents have died in a tragic accident, she has to return home to Charleston to attend the funeral and deal with the estate. Also attending, however, is Mark – the younger brother who got everything he wanted, dropped out of the school their parents paid for, and always seems to need another dollar.
Among the collection of junk piled up in their parents’ house are puppets – their mother’s career and hobby. Her favorite, Pupkin, an unsettling clown-looking thing, begins to take on a life of its own. Louise and Mark must uncover the things left unsaid in their family and process the haunting past they both share with Pupkin before the evil spreads beyond the siblings.
Hendrix clearly understands the two tenets of horror – 1. Horror is only as interesting as the people it’s happening to, and 2. Horror is the manifestation of the things we don’t like to think/talk about in our real lives. His books love to create strong character dramas and often don’t show their supernatural hand until the second half of the book.
The protagonists in many of Hendrix’s books are women and the horror is often an allegory for social and personal issues women face. Previous works have dealt with the suffocating feeling of not being believed or listened to (“The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires”) and entertainment’s fascination with violence against women (“The Final Girls Support Group”), while “Haunted House” deals with grief, loss, and generational trauma.
Hendrix builds on the existing foundations of the haunted puppet horror (“Child’s Play”, “Goosebumps”) and the examination of a family processing grief (“Hereditary”) and adds his unique humor and narrative voice to make an established subgenre feel fresh. There is a moment in every Hendrix novel where the reader begins to question if anything supernatural will happen at all because the introductory character sections are so compelling on their own.