Grady Hendrix’s horror novels are a gateway drug to the genre, bridging the warm and cozy...with the harder stuff ... By weaving violence, family trauma and humor, Hendrix creates a texture that engages the reader emotionally and viscerally ... Hendrix’s humor is also on display ... Gripping, wildly entertaining.
This ingenious novel is a twisted story of malevolent puppets and dolls that have a problem with real estate deals ... Every chapter reveals new horrors ... In How to Sell a Haunted House, Hendrix, with relentless efficiency — and a bit of humor — forces us to confront our fears.
Grady Hendrix's work occupies a unique interstitial space between emotional storytelling, unnerving, gory horror, and a dash of comedy. His latest, How to Sell a Haunted House, fully embraces all the elements readers have come to love about what he does ... Campy, unexpectedly deep — and as creepy as the dead eyes of a puppet at midnight in a gloomy room — How to Sell a Haunted House is a tense, dark novel ... An entertaining read that morphs into something new a few times ... There's something magical about books where you can tell the author was having fun while writing — and it seems like this was the case for Hendrix when writing How to Sell a Haunted House. Also, this is a book that constantly goes from tense and frustrating to unsettling and sad to lighthearted and fun, and the constant shifts keep readers on their toes and create curiosity about what comes next.
In this tale of ghostly happenings and creepy objects, the human drama at the core of it all is often even scarier than the supernatural ... Trappings exist to remind you what kind of story you’re reading, and to create a certain atmosphere, but they’re also there so Hendrix can carefully, delicately, and thrillingly reinvent them to his own ends ... Every time you think How to Sell a Haunted House can’t get more jaw-dropping, along comes the author with another reveal, another left turn that’s at once shocking and right at home within this narrative. It’s a pulse-pounding exercise in pure horror drive that never loses sight of its emotional core, and that makes it quintessential Hendrix.
The novel reminded me of the frenetic, compulsive energy that propelled me through pulp horror paperbacks as a kid, except cleverly updated for a contemporary adult audience ... Hendrix’s prose is often, at the same time, downright hilarious ... The moments of humor lighten the intense bursts of horror, violence, and fright that otherwise drive the plot forward; they also reconfigure our initial ideas about Mark and Louise as people, the more information about them we uncover ... How to Sell a Haunted House concludes on solid footing, with a sense of hope that doesn’t ignore the long-term effects of pain and grief.
Grady Hendrix has a knack for creating characters who feel like real people ... The world feels lived-in, populated with real people who have their own real lives.
Readers will be completely sucked in by Hendrix’s adept prose, and the creepy dollhouse on the attention-grabbing cover, designed by Emily Osborne, is perfect in tone and plays well with the book’s subject matter.
How to Sell a Haunted House effectively marries tropes ripped straight from the pages of a midcentury pulp magazine to a Pat Conroy-esque chronicle of Lowcountry generational trauma ... How to Sell a Haunted House may be a heightened tale of horror, but it is built on something true. And it’s a lot of fun, as well.
Hilarious, horrifying and surprisingly tender ... Even more than Hendrix's previous works, this novel finds the heart-wrenching core of its central trope, developing its characters to serve as emotional support beams for a story structured on family legacies of both loss and love.
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 ... 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.
