A little horror, a little humor: ‘How to Sell a Haunted House’
Tales of terror, by their very nature, take the things we cherish and turn them against us: A beloved pet wants to kill us (“Cujo”), our home is cursed (“The Haunting of Hill House”), the baby we’re expecting turns demonic (“Rosemary’s Baby”). Yet, of all the horror tropes, is there any that’s scarier than dolls and puppets that come to life?
Grady Hendrix creates a whole new kind of toybox hell in “How to Sell a Haunted House.” This ingenious novel is a twisted story of malevolent puppets and dolls that have a problem with real estate deals. (Yes, there’s comic relief.)
This time around, Hendrix — who has written six other novels including “Horrorstör,” about a bigbox store that sounds a lot like Ikea, and the darkly comic “The Final Girls Support Group” — recounts the attack of puppet people that erupts when orphaned siblings Louise and Mark Joyner must work together to empty and sell the family home. If you’ve ever had to sort and discard a loved one’s possessions, you know what a true horror show it can be. And even before the puppets take a run at Mark and Louise, they’re emotionally terrorized by lingering childhood trauma and personal problems.
Like many people, Louise and Mark have financial difficulties, and if they want to cash in on their parents’ 1951 brick rancher in Charleston they must clean it out. But what if their parents’ possessions don’t want to leave? Things get weird fast when Louise hears voices inside the supposedly abandoned house. She discovers two dolls from her mother’s extensive collection sitting in her father’s brown velour chair, watching a shopping channel doll show. The three-foot-tall dolls are named Louise and Mark. Louise’s mother, who ran a Christian puppet ministry, loved the dolls more than the children she named them after, but most of all she loved her hand puppet, Pupkin, who talks and walks and makes dozens of other dolls, puppets and humans do his bidding. Creepy.
Every chapter reveals new horrors as puppets, dolls and taxidermized squirrels go on the defensive. The details are too delicious to reveal, but peek through your fingers at Pupkin dressed in “a blood-red body suit with a pointed hood and a yellow stomach.” Then continue, as “impossibly, without anyone moving him, he bent forward and climbed unsteadily onto his little nubbin legs. The empty sleeve of his puppet hole hung behind him like a tail.” When he starts running toward Louise, hissing and baring his teeth, Hendrix blows the hinges off the safety hatch that separates your comfy reading experience from “The Twilight Zone.”
In uncertain times, readers relate to horror stories and consider their outrageousness a balm for what ails us. It’s why contemporary horror novelists like Hendrix, Stephen Graham Jones and Silvia Moreno-Garcia are slashing their way up bestseller lists. Their novels teach us to stand up to whatever stands in for the crazed puppets in our lives. In “How to Sell a Haunted House,” Hendrix, with relentless efficiency — and a bit of humor — forces us to confront our fears.
This ingenious novel is a twisted story of malevolent puppets and dolls that have a problem with real estate deals.