Grady Hendrix had been all over my algorithm by the time I decided to give one of his books a shot last October. As many of you know, I’m one of the cheapest bastards in Nashville, Tennessee. The kick I needed to actually pick up one of his novels came when I was perusing the shelves of our favorite local used bookstore, Harper’s Books, on the square in lovely historic Lebanon, Tennessee. A brand new hardback cover of How to Sell a Haunted House was listed at just $11. Remembering I had a $10 store credit, I ended up spending a whopping one U.S. dollar and some change. It was settled. This was going to be the book that kicked off my 2025 spooky season reading campaign.
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…
The things I loved the most about this book had very little to do with the horror of it all. I’m a sucker for themes that deal with generational trauma, and that was one of the messages most well-received. This book is masquerading as a horror novel, when really, the story symbolizes the jeopardy we put ourselves in the longer we ignore our problems and continue to try and push through. Things have a weird way of forcing their way out, and we see that in this story.
But, the story also sparked some interesting reflections on the concept of returning to your roots…how home is still home regardless of how much things have changed…that you can still step right back into your childhood in the right spots. Home is also represented as a sort of anchor, holding down your growth as a person. In this is story, it ends up being sort of cathartic that it’s at home where Louise finally tries to settle the score. I enjoyed the brother-sister dynamic at the heart of this story, and found both characters to be interesting in the sense that I swayed back and forth between feeling empathy for them and thinking, “yeah, a lot of y’all’s shit…ya brought on yourself.”
However, the frights never really reach a fever pitch and the moments of terror come few and far between in this one. I’ve jokingly called it “horror for housewives” because it is such a dramatic story (in a good way). But, I do think this is genuinely a good place to start as an introduction to the horror genre. I was hoping for something a little more intense. What I got was a far richer story than anticipated, but one that didn’t exactly keep me awake at night. It felt rather tame in the actual horror department. That said, it’s a breeze to read. I think it took me just a handful of sittings to get through it, and that’s a testament to Hendrix’s ability to get that story to really flow. I’ll be checking out more of his work as time marches on.
Stoney Keeley is the Editor in Chief of The SoBros Network, second on Football & Other F Words, analyst for Stacking The Inbox, and a Dogs Playing Poker on velvet connoisseur. He is a strong supporter of Team GSD, #BeBetter, and ‘Minds right, asses tight.’ “Big Natural” covers the Tennessee Titans, the NFL Draft, Nashville, Yankee Candle, and a whole wealth of nonsense. Follow on Twitter @StoneyKeeley.
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