If you’re thinking about checking out How to Sell a Haunted House yourself, don’t worry about spoilers. The first part of my reviews are always spoiler-free so you can see if the book is your cup of tea. After a quick summary and a basic review, I’ll give a spoiler warning and do a deep dive into everything I loved and hated about How to Sell a Haunted House.

Grady Hendrix is a prolific author with a talent for writing the most gory and wincing scenes. Other popular books by this American author include Horrorstör, a horror based on Ikea, and The Final Girl Support Group, which follows a group of final girls as they fight their monsters.

Content Warning

I always like to give a quick content warning for any sensitive topics. These are some content warnings for How to sell a Haunted House:

Violence.
Clowns.
Dolls.
Death.
Ghosts.
Paranormal.
Pregnancy.
Blood.
Paranoia.
Gore.

Quick Synopsis

How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix follows Louise Joyner, a single mother who navigates the death of her parents, Nancy and Eric. Though Louise’s father was a no-nonsense professor, her mom was a creative who loved making everything from taxidermy to puppets. When Louise returns to her home town to clean out her parent’s house, she and her brother Mark find out that their parents left more than just dolls and family drama behind.

My Rating

Everybody has to come up with their own system for judging and rating books, and here’s mine:

One star: I couldn’t finish the book. (DNF)
Two stars: I struggled to finish, but I did.
Three stars: This book was okay and worth reading.
Four stars: I liked this book and I would recommend it to a friend.
Five stars: I’d read this book again, and it’s going on my favorites shelf.

By no means do I think this is a perfect rating system, but I had to come up with something that would help me avoid arbitrarily assigning ratings. This provides a solid guideline for rating qualifications.

How to Sell a Haunted House gets three stars from me because I enjoyed it, but I wouldn’t read it again or recommend it to a friend. Honestly, it was at four stars all the way up until nearly the ending, but then the rating dropped. I’ll go into more detail during my deep dive about what made that rating change for me.

I don’t read a lot of paranormal or horror books like this one, and checked it out becasuse my partner loves Grady Hendrix. I don’t have any specific recomendations based on this book, but if you enjoyed it, you may like some of this others, like

The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

Summary

We’re now entering the spoiler-y part of this review. If you think How to Sell a Haunted House sounds like your cup of tea, click away, read it, and come back to see if you agree or disagree with my critique. If you like the sound of the book but you don’t want to read it, don’t worry, I’ll give you the full rundown.

SPOILERS

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SPOILERS -

How to Sell a Haunted House starts with Louise telling her parents that she’s pregnant. Louise knows she’s going to be a single mother from the start, and she’s excited. Though she expects her parents to be weary of her decision, they’re completely supportive instead, and come to stay with her for a few days to help her shop for baby things.

When Louise’s daughter, Poppy, is five, Eric and Nancy are in a car crash that kills them both. Louise’s brother, Mark, calls her to tell her the news, but Louise doesn’t believe him at first. She doesn’t trust Mark and thinks he’s entitled and unreliable.

It turns out to be true, and Louise leaves Poppy in California when she flies home for the funeral. She goes to her parents’ house, which is full of her mother’s dolls.

It creeps her out and she sleeps in her hotel, only going over to the house to keep Mark from having a garbage company clear it out. Louise’s dad and her had discussed everything going to her when her parents passed, and Louise splitting the money and putting half of it in a trust for her brother.

Following the funeral, Mark insists on reading the will. Louise is shocked to find out that though her father left everything to her, their mother left everything to Mark. Mark dances and gloats at the news, making it clear that he doesn’t intend to give Louise any of the money, and Louise storms off to her hotel, ready to leave.

After looking more closely at the will, Louise discovers that all her mom’s art is left to her. She uses this knowledge to her advantage and goes back to the house, telling Mark that he’ll have to wait to sell it until after she goes through all the art. He sits in a lawn chair outside and keeps watch so she doesn’t take anything—including the stuffed animals in her room—that doesn’t belong to her.

Louise’s mom had made a nativity scene using taxidermied squirrels, and Louise wakes from a nap to find the squirrels attacking her. She tells herself that they’re squirrels from the attic, and not from the nativity scene. Despite her logical reassurances to herself, she still storms out of the house, catching Mark by surprise and telling him that she’s leaving and not coming back.

Later, at her hotel, she’s surprised when Mark shows up and offers to give her 25% of the money from the house if she helps him with the paperwork. Louise finds out that cousin, who is a real estate agent, told Mark that she would advise all of the other agents in the area not to work with him if he didn’t give money to his sister.

With the money in mind, Louise returns to the house, and she and her brother start to deal with the creepy dolls. Her cousin comes over to assess the house and says she won’t list it until they deal with the fact that it’s haunted. Louise insists it’s not haunted and vows to sleep there to prove it’s true. Mark tells her not to, but she does anyway.

Then, she wakes up in the middle of the night, being attacked by her mom’s favorite puppet, Pupkin. The puppet manages to stick a needle in her eye, but Mark shows up and shoots it a few times. Louise and Mark retreat to a Waffle House.

Louise and Mark talk about how Pupkin had bullied Louise when she was little, demanding that she try to drown Mark in a lake. Mark shares that he had taken Pupkin with him to college, which lead to him eventually setting a house on fire and potentially killing his friends.

The siblings return to the house with the plan to throw Pupkin on the grill and burn him. When they get there, Pupkin sics a variety of monsters on them, including Mark’s imaginary dog from when he was a kid. Louise is running from the dog, and is about to die, when Mark puts Pupkin on his hand and the dog backs off.

Pupkin, using Mark’s body, attacks Louise with a hammer, getting her in the head. Louise tries to yank the puppet off, but can’t, and ends up using a wood saw in the garage to cut Mark’s arm off. She gets him to the hospital, but they can’t reattach the arm, and Louise returns to her parents’ house, where she traps Pupkin in the grill and sprays him with lighter fluid.

We think the story is over, but when Louise returns home, it’s to Poppy, who now has Pupkin on her hand. Louise tries to take the puppet away, but she can’t get it off Poppy’s arm. Louise goes to her family for help, and discovers that Pupkin is actually the spirit her mother’s brother, who died when he was little because Nancy hadn’t been keeping an eye on him.

Fighting through an army of dolls at Pupkin’s command, Louise and Mark manage to dig up the little boy’s bones in the backyard and release his spirit. The story ends with Mark splitting the money with Louise, and Poppy being free from Pupkin’s hold.

Deep Dive

Praise

How to Sell a Haunted House checks the thriller box of successfully thrilling. The actions scenes, the creepy dolls, and the imagery of Louise having a needle stuck in her eye all worked together to produce a few action-packed scenes that definitely got my heart racing.

I also appreciated the conflict between Mark and Louise. There’s something about Mark’s gloating after the funeral, when he finds out everything is left to him, that makes you absolutely furious. When Louise storms back to her hotel room, you can feel the hatred for her brother, too.

Their tense relationship heightens the discomfort from the conflict with the dolls and the haunted house. If we were watching two united heroes, we might at least feel at ease in their committment to one another, but knowing they could turn on each other makes us question who the real bad guy is.

Another thing this story does well is alienating these two from the outside world. Their trip to Waffle House immediately following the conflict with the dolls, and the conflict with the house-cleaning company, helps you remember that though the evil dolls are real to them, there are others in this story that don’t see the same reality.

Louise’s struggle with being a good mother is another element I appreciate. This, coupled with her doubts for her mental health, leads Louise to question herself, which makes it even harder for us to believe that she and Mark are going to prevail.

Criticism

My first criticism for How to Sell a Haunted House has to do with pacing. My biggest issue, and the thing that ultimately made me drop the rating, was Louise’s discovery of Pupkin on her daughter’s arm. At that point, I felt tired of reading, and just wanted to get through the rest of the book.

It felt like we’d already had our big battle with Pupkin, and his reappearance made the pacing at the end slow down a lot. The book mentions multiple times that Poppy is dull, and nothing like herself, when she has Pupkin on her arm, but Poppy spends almost the entire book in California, so I feel like we don’t completely feel the effect of what it’s like for her to have Pupkin attached to her.

I thought How to Sell a Haunted House was perfectly fine, though it did slow down a lot at the end. If you read it, leave me a comment and let me know what you thought about Pupkin’s second act. You can add me on Goodreads to see what I plan to read next.

These area some books I may read next:

Secretly Yours by Tessa Bailey
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka
The Maid by Nita Prose
All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

Book Review | How to Sell a Haunted House - Grady Hendrix