Louise Joyner left house as quickly as she may, fleeing the humidity of Charleston, South Carolina, for a profession in industrial design in Silicon Valley. Her brother, Mark, stayed put, his meandering and dysfunctional way of life patronized to his face and savaged in his absence by his household, as is so typically the case with mildly disappointing scions of good Southern households. But now, Louise and Mark should work out what to do with the relics of their not too long ago departed mother and father’ lives: their father’s idiosyncratic economics analysis, their mom’s huge assortment of Christian puppets and their home. However, some revenants is not going to go quietly into that good evening. There are burdens this household has politely buried for much too lengthy, and the Joyners are about to uncover that some hauntings are neither stagecraft nor hellspawn. Some hauntings are home made.
Author Grady Hendrix is a Charleston native, and How to Sell a Haunted House utterly nails its Lowcountry setting. This reviewer can be a South Carolinian and might affirm that neither the concept of a Christian puppet ministry nor the precise Fellowship of Christian Puppeteers are made up. The depiction of Carolina tradition can be correct, particularly Hendrix’s portrayal of how somebody who grew up in it, left after which got here again would understand it: acquainted and peculiar, unsettling and comforting, prompting a reckoning with how deeply unusual its model of regular actually is. Hendrix solely departs from this actuality in a method: In no gauzy South Carolina summer season that I can recall did the knickknacks purchase a vengeful sentience and wreak havoc on the strained psyches of a household’s prodigal offspring.
How to Sell a Haunted House successfully marries tropes ripped straight from the pages of a midcentury pulp journal to a Pat Conroy-esque chronicle of Lowcountry generational trauma. Families are heat and beautiful but additionally stifling, similar to the summers; rituals are banal but additionally sacred, their violation the gravest of transgressions; and there are at all times skeletons (or puppets) within the stitching closets. How to Sell a Haunted House could also be a heightened story of horror, however it’s constructed on one thing true. And it’s a lot of enjoyable, as effectively.
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