How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Note: I would like to apologise if this review isn’t very good. I’ve been quite ill, and dealing with some mental health issues. But I really wanted to try to get back on track here.
Mark and Louise haven’t gotten along since they were children. In fact, they barely interact with each other. When both their parents die in an accident however, they must reunite to organise the funerals and decide what to do with the house. Initially, they can’t seem to agree on anything. But then strange things begin to happen around the house that they grew up in, things that unite them against a foe they might not be strong enough to deal with together, let alone separately.
Grady Hendrix has done it again folks. I’m sure you don’t need to hear me say that. I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of other people say it already, but I feel like it bears repeating. Grady Hendrix has done it again. How he manages to construct such bizarre, out of this world stories that remain so grounded in humanity is beyond me. But I don’t need to understand everything. In this case, I am just going to enjoy the results.
How to Sell a Haunted House tells the story of two estranged siblings that must come together to deal with the mundane things that must be dealt with after death. Funerals, wills, paperwork, selling the old family home. All the things that don’t feel that important after losing someone you love. In amongst all this though, something isn’t quite right in the house, and it seems that something malevolent has taken up residence.
I don’t want to say too much about the haunted aspect of this book, as it would be a terrible shame to spoil any of that for you. But it does contain moments of true helplessness, and is strange and unique from many haunted stories of the past. And while the supernatural elements of this book are definitely the appeal, the quiet moments between Louise, Mark, and other human characters shine.
Watching Louise and Mark attempt to navigate their complicated sibling relationship while dealing with shared grief over the death of their parents was emotionally evocative, and the moments they were side by side during the haunting were often intense. And yet, there was a humour shared between them, and a history that bound them deeper than they perhaps realised. There was so much humanity in these two characters it was truly astounding.
This story contained many tense moments, spectacular dark humour, and as mentioned just now, a whole heaping of human emotion. I got to the end and was surprised to find myself crying. Granted, I was dealing with grief of my own (my brother’s dog, Sid, had just died), but the ending felt like a beautiful portrayal of the nature of death, real grief or no.
As you can probably tell from this review, I adored Grady Hendrix’s latest weird, funny, heartbreaking, eerie story, and I think that if you’ve read and enjoyed him before, or you want a unique take on the haunted house subgenre, then How to Sell a Haunted House is for you!
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Rebecka O'Malley 