Louise and Mark are estranged siblings who are forced to find a way to work together in an effort to clean out their parents’ house. That’s the starting point for Grady Hendrix’s novel How to Sell a Haunted House.
Louise and Mark squabble over everything, including how they should deal with the contents of the house: Mark calls it “junk”; Louise is more sentimental. It isn’t until things start to get, well, weird, that the siblings discover they have more in common than they realized.
When Louise arrives in Charleston, she discovers that Mark has already arranged for Agutter Clutter to come and cart away all the stuff their parents, Nancy and Eric, have accumulated over the years–and it’s a lot of stuff. Well, it’s a lot of puppets and dolls. That’s because Nancy was a puppeteer with “a Christian puppet ministry”. Neither of the siblings is really a fan and one puppet in particular makes “Louise’s skin crawl.”
Pupkin was a red-and-yellow glove puppet with two stumpy fabric legs dangling down from his front and two little nubbin arms. His chalk-white plastic face had 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. His moth and eyes were outlined in thick black lines and he wore a bloodred bodysuit with a pointed hood and a yellow stomach […]he looked like he’d crawled straight out of a nightmare.
How to Sell a Haunted House is often funny, and also violent and creepy (and this will be especially true if dolls and puppets make you uneasy). And, then, like in the other Hendrix books I have read (My Best Friend’s Exorcism, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires), it also offers a deeper look at something more meaningful and real than just straight-up scares. (I didn’t find this book particularly scary, although it did, on occasion, make me squirm.)
This book tracks the emotions attached with grief (each section of the book is named after one of the five stages), the unresolved feelings you’re left with when you lose someone unexpectedly, and the notion that when your loved one is gone, all you have left –if you are lucky — are the people you have shared the journey with. If you are really lucky, that is a sibling.
Super enjoyable read.