“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.”
As
someone put this, How to Sell a Haunted House is like
Annabelle meets Child’s Play, mixed with a wonderfully Southern dysfunctional
family drama. It’s also about dark secrets our family –both intimate and
extended- keeps. Ones we sadly pass down from one generation to the next. Where
Hendrix’s previous work was bit homage’s to growing up in the 80s and 90s, this
is a bit more mature work, but still filled with his perfect dark sense of
humor. I mean, I guess, less campy, even if he treads familiar ground with
possessed dolls.
It’s not
a perfect novel, as it takes forever to get going and it takes a lot to really
like Louise and Mark –even when I see some my own sibling rivalry in their
relationship. They’re both rather horrible people, but I can understand Louise’s
choice to leave Charleston and move to San Francisco. She’s escaping her family’s
problems with hopes of starting fresh. Still, at times Mark and her relationship
is a bit soap opera-ish and some of the dialogue about modern parenting is
reminder that while I may not have the most perfect mother, she never worried about
explain to us concepts like death and being a consistent parent. And Aunt Honey
easily gives up the dark tale of the family after keeping it buried for
sixty-eight years.
I can’t
hate it, as it was silly fun, and Hendrix appears to maturing as writer of
Southern Gothic Horror, but like his previous tomes, it stumbles here and there
and never becomes a home run you think it should
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