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Synopsis:
Grady Hendrix takes on the haunted house in a thrilling new novel that explores the way your past—and your family—can haunt you like nothing else.
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…
Review:
In Grady Hendrix’s sixth novel, Louise learns that her parents have died in a car crash, and she has to return to her childhood home in Charleston, SC to help with the funeral and decisions as to what will happen with the house and all of the belongings inside. This includes a huge doll collection and a room filled with homemade puppet from her mother’s Christian ministries. Her brother, Mark, has differing opinions on what they should do with all of the stuff, and how much more he deserves than Louise. After a few days of fighting with Mark and trying to clear out some of her mother’s things, Louise learns that there is much more to her parent’s house than just a bunch of junk.
I have never had such a visceral reaction to the attitudes and actions of two main characters while reading any other novel. Louise and Mark are the worst. They are two of the most self-centered, selfish, garbage people I have ever read. Both of them are hateful to each other and Louise’s reason for leaving her daughter with her ex in San Francisco for a longer period of time is money. The money is not even that significant amount, and it is obvious from the way that her brother operates that the money is not even guaranteed. Mark is definitely a guy who would double cross his sister to keep all of the money for himself, and feel justified in it. There are no redeeming qualities in either of these characters and when bad things happen to them, they become even more insufferable.
Grady Hendrix can write, and he does a good job writing horror novels, but I am not sure that his horror novels are the type of horror novels that I like. This is my third novel of his, and The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires is the only one I have been able to recommend. The other two, The Final Girl Support Group and How to Sell a Haunted House have left a great amount to be desired, and the biggest problem in them is that the characters are so unlikable that I do not care what happens to them. My favorite character in this book, Barb, a woman who buys haunted toys online to purge them of their demons only has one scene. I liked her for the same reason why I liked all of the ladies in The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. They are Southern women with lemonade, pot lucks, and “Bless your heart” manners. They are the best characters in any of Grady Hendrix work and maybe all of horror. Unfortunately there is very little of this southern “charm” in this novel, and the rest of the novel is not very entertaining. Grady Hendrix knows how to write, but the characters that he writes are either very endearing or incredibly irritating, and he spends more time on the latter.
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