Louise is a young single mother who left Charleston to go to college and never really looked back. She is a successful UI designer in San Francisco, and her daughter, Poppy, is her life. While Poppy's father, Ian, isn't estranged from them, she makes a point of being as independent from him as possible. Unfortunately, this story begins with some really bad news for Louise.
Mark, Louise's deadbeat brother who dropped out of college and has burned through his savings in various bad get-rich-quick schemes, calls her and tells her that their parents died in a car accident. Leaving Poppy with Ian, Louise heads back home. While she thinks she knows what to expect, she can't possibly imagine the series of events that follow from that dreaded phone call.
Mark and Louise's relationship hasn't really been all that great. While Louise tended to follow their father's more analytical habits, Mark took after their mother's more artistic side, even dipping briefly into puppetry, their mother's claim to fame. Nancy was known for her Christian puppet ministries where she would use her collection of puppets to tell Bible stories, and while the puppets had always creeped Louise out, Mark seemed to have accepted them all his life.
The friction between the siblings starts up immediately when Louise arrives in Charleston and finds that Mark has already hired someone to clean out their parents' place so it can be sold. While she can stop the service before they actually get going, the fact that he has already started acting without her involvement immediately causes Louise's hackles to go up. Their relationship only worsens when their parents' wills are read and, because of the order of the deaths, their mom leaves everything to Mark. Well, almost everything - Nancy does leave all of her art, including her puppets, to Louise.
Unfortunately for both Mark and Louise, this is where the real trouble begins. For one, the creepy puppet, Pupkin, that was their mother's companion since she was a young girl, is even creepier looking now than ever before. But when Louise throws it away, she finds it returning to the house. Pupkin isn't the only one of Nancy's creations that seem to get rearranged without anyone moving them. There's the strange doll versions of Mark and Louise and there is even a set of taxidermied squirrels arranged as a nativity, all of which don't seem to want to stay where they were last put. Of course, Louise immediately thinks that Mark is moving them to creep her out, but that wouldn't make for a very interesting ghost story, would it?
When Mark and Louise' cousin, a local real estate agent, does a walk-through of the house and proclaims the place haunted and unsellable until the issue is resolved, Louise stonewalls the idea while Mark is immediately accepting of the possibility. Louise decides that she will do whatever is necessary to convince Mark that the house has been "cleansed" so that it can be sold and she can return to San Francisco to be with her daughter. Unfortunately, what started as just creepy puppets being in places they shouldn't quickly escalates to full blown attacks and even Louise has to start to consider that the house might be haunted, either that, or their mother passed some mental illness to her children.
As Louise tries to work her head around the two possibilities, Mark sits her down and forces her to confront some hard truths about their childhood. It seems that their family has some secrets, and some of them Louise is even keeping from herself. In order to get past the events in How to Sell a Haunted House, Mark and Louise will have to do some major introspection and shed light on more than one dark secret in their past. If not, Pupkin and the rest of Nancy's puppets might cause some serious harm. As it is, neither of them are going to escape unscathed, and Louise can't help but feel worried about her own daughter during this entire event.
I'm always up for a good ghost story, and How to Sell a Haunted House hits the spot nicely. Couple that with my own personal phobia of puppets ... well, primarily marionettes, and this book really fits me as a reader. On top of that, Hendrix's use of personal loss and grief as a structure to explore this ghost story adds a lot more depth to what could easily have been just a Puppet Master rehash. Grady Hendrix was already an author I was keeping my eye on because of The Final Girl Support Group, but How to Sell a Haunted House just solidifies that decision for me. Now, I just need to take some time and read his older books.
