How to sell a haunted house /
Material type: TextPublisher: New York : Berkley, [2023]Copyright date: 2023Description: 413 pages : illustrations ; 24 cmContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9780593201268
- 0593201264
- 9780593547731
- 059354773X
- 9798885780841
- Haunted houses -- Fiction
- Grief -- Fiction
- Real property -- Fiction
- FICTION / Horror
- FICTION / Thrillers / Suspense
- FICTION / Thrillers / Psychological
- Grief
- Haunted houses
- Real property
- Parents -- Death
- Siblings
- Parents -- Death -- Fiction
- Siblings -- Fiction
- Houses -- Buying and selling -- Fiction
- Ghost stories
- Southern States -- Fiction
- Southern States
- 813/.6 23/eng/20220606
- PS3608.E543 H69 2023
Item type | Current library | Home library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Standard Loan | Coeur d'Alene Library Adult Fiction | Coeur d'Alene Library | Book | HENDRIX (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610023739902 | |||
Standard Loan | Harrison Library Adult Fiction | Harrison Library | Book | HENDRIX (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610024225810 | |||
Standard Loan | Hayden Library Adult Fiction | Hayden Library | Book | HENDRIX (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610024225877 | |||
Standard Loan | Liberty Lake Library Adult Fiction | Liberty Lake Library | Book | FIC HENDRIX (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Checked out | 05/22/2024 | 31421000718081 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"Wildly entertaining." -The New York Times
"Ingenious." -The Washington Post
New York Times bestselling author 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...
Like his novels The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires and The Final Girl Support Group , How to Sell a Haunted House is classic Hendrix: equal parts heartfelt and terrifying--a gripping new read from "the horror master" ( USA Today ).
"New York Times bestselling author Grady Hendrix takes on the haunted house in a hilarious and terrifying new novel that explores the way your past--and your family--can haunt you like nothing else... Louise's parents have passed away, and she's returning to the small Southern town where she grew up to get their house ready to sell. It means she'll have to spend time with her younger brother--and their old grudges make that a terrifying prospect. But childhood hurts pale in comparison to the dangers posed by what still lives inside the house"--
Louise's parents have passed away, and she's returning to Charleston, where she grew up, to get their house ready to sell. She doesn't want to deal with the remnants of her father's academic career and her mother's lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. And she doesn't want to spend time with her younger brother, Mark: their old grudges make that a terrifying prospect. But childhood hurts pale in comparison to the dangers posed by what still lives inside the house. Some houses don't want to be sold... and Louise and Mark's home has other plans for both of them. -- adapted from jacket
Excerpt provided by Syndetics
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
Siblings Louise and Mark Joyner are left with the task of selling their childhood home after their parents' deaths. The problem? Louise and Mark, driven apart by a rough childhood, have not talked to each other in years, and both are facing drained bank accounts due to a pandemic-caused economic downturn. When they enter the house, they notice the attic is boarded up, and newspapers are covering the mirrors. Neither one can imagine the horror and secrets they are about to encounter. Hendrix (Final Girls Support Group) has written another novel in his signature style, brimming with humor, horror, and heart. He delves into family secrets and the dangers they pose, even generations later. The narrative is Chucky meets The Exorcist with a dash of comedy, leaving listeners simultaneously chuckling and perhaps a little sick to their stomachs. Narrators Jay Aaseng and Mikhaila Aaseng give stunning performances of the siblings and an especially unsettling portrayal of the creepy puppets that inhabit the house. VERDICT Hendrix is poised to be one of the greats of horror fiction, and libraries will want to put this audio at the top of their lists. A must-add for any horror collection.--Elyssa EverlingPublishers Weekly Review
Grief, generational trauma, and some sinister puppets animate this wildly entertaining haunted house tale from bestseller Hendrix (Final Girl Support Group). Hyper-competent single mother Louise Joyner and her estranged layabout brother, Mark, come together in the wake of their parents' death, a reunion that consists largely of miscommunicating, airing simmering resentments, and bickering over their parents' estate. Their Charleston childhood home was left to Mark, but their mother's extensive puppet collection and whimsically creepy artworks went to Louise, meaning they'll have to work together to clear the house out before selling it. After chapters of weird vibes and possibly moving dolls, it's both refreshing and hilarious when the siblings get a realtor to the house and she frankly declares, "Your house is haunted and I'm not selling it until you deal with that." Mark accepts the haunting as fact immediately, while Louise refuses to believe in the supernatural, even when the evidence is right in front of her. Hendrix does a fantastic job shading the sibling relationship, making the love, pain, and fundamental misunderstandings between them clear even before their intense backstory is revealed. The blurring of the supernatural and the psychological, meanwhile, is an effective engine for both suspense and humor on the way to a bloody confrontation. This is a gem. (Jan.)Booklist Review
Louise, a single mother, lives in California with her five-year-old daughter, Poppy. She has spent her life trying to keep physical and emotional distance from her family in South Carolina, especially her overly indulged brother, Mark. But when her parents die suddenly, Louise is forced to return home and reckon with the secrets that have been haunting her family for generations--secrets that may be actively trying to kill them. Organized into sections that refer to the stages of grief, the story follows Louise as she cleans out her parents' home, assessing hundreds of puppets and dolls that were her mom's life's work. The attic entrance is boarded up, the dolls appear to move on their own, and Pupkin, the unsettling clown puppet that was her mother's favorite, seems to be at the center of it all. Closure will take more than Mark and Louise getting along; it will require them to truly understand one another before they can have any hope of making it through this ordeal alive. With strong connections to twenty-first century classics such as Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts (2015) and Joe Hill's Locke and Key (2009), Hendrix' book sets the high watermark for horror in 2023.Kirkus Book Review
A woman returns home to bury her parents only to find a spectacularly terrifying blast from the past waiting for her. By now, Hendrix is deep-dipped in 1970s and '80s horror tropes after depicting a haunted IKEA in Horrorstör (2014) and subsequent excursions into vampirism, exorcism, serial slaying, and the like. This one is set in the present day, but Hendrix is hooked up to another Stephen King IV drip, nicely emulating the elder's penchant for everyday human drama while elevating the creep factor with his own disquieting imagination. Louise Joyner is beyond disbelief when her estranged brother, Mark, calls to tell her their parents are dead after a suspicious car accident. As she reluctantly returns home to Charleston, South Carolina, the underachieving Mark is already plotting to cheat her out of her half of the house, while a pair of quixotic aunts try to make peace between the two. One sticking point is the fate of the hundreds of dolls their mother, Nancy, made, collected, curated, and obsessed over. Mark's boneheaded schemes; Louise's yearning for her 5-year-old daughter, Poppy; and their collective grief introduce the tale, but Hendrix wastes no time in ratcheting the Pennywise vibes up to 11. It's little surprise that the siblings' secret tormentor is Pupkin, their mother's very favorite puppet---"The one who made Louise's skin crawl. The one she hated the most." Pupkin is newly prone to temper tantrums and homicidal rage when he doesn't get what he wants--and since he can't yet conceptualize that Nancy is dead, he just wants her back home with him. Horrific visions of anthropomorphic dolls, a bloody, near-fatal misadventure, and emotional extortion including nail-biting child peril soon follow. Pupkin the killer puppet doesn't have the foul mouth of Chucky or the primal menace of the aforementioned clown, but the combination of Hendrix's trippy take on the stages of grief and a plethora of nightmare fuel delivers a retro wallop for those in the mood. Warm up the VCR and fire up the air popper for a most bitchin' horror story by a gifted practitioner of these dark arts. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.Author notes provided by Syndetics
Grady Hendrix is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. He is the author of Horrorstör , My Best Friend's Exorcism (which is being adapted into a feature film by Amazon Studios), We Sold Our Souls , and the New York Times bestseller The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires (currently being adapted into a TV series). Grady also authored the Bram Stoker Award-winning nonfiction book Paperbacks from Hell , a history of the horror paperback boom of the seventies and eighties, and his latest non-fiction book is These Fists Break Bricks : How Kung Fu Movies Swept America and Changed the World .There are no comments on this title.