[Book] How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix
Book & Audiobook Review
How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix
Book & Audiobook Review:
Listening to How to Sell a Haunted House in audiobook format is an eerie yet surprisingly emotional experience. Even though horror isn't my typical genre, the audiobook version added a depth and intensity that made it all the more engaging, especially since I read it for a book club. The author, Grady Hendrix, uses the haunted house setting not only to deliver chills but also to explore adult sibling rivalry and the lasting impact of unresolved childhood conflicts.
The audiobook pulls you in with the strained relationship between Louise and Mark Joyner, a sister and brother grappling with their parents' sudden death. The narration captures the tension and grief between them—Louise’s disbelief that her mother favored Mark, Mark’s difficulty in understanding Louise’s pain—it all feels so real and raw as the story unfolds. The narrator's performance really emphasizes the complex emotions each sibling experiences, making their struggles relatable even in the midst of the supernatural chaos.
Nancy, their late mother, was a Christian puppeteer, and the house she and their father left behind feels truly haunted. The audiobook brings this haunting to life with chilling sound effects and a sinister tone whenever the creepy puppets, particularly the menacing Pupkin, come into play. As the narrator describes Mark and Louise’s encounters with these eerie relics of their childhood, you can feel the dread seeping through the story. Pupkin, a puppet central to their mother’s parenting, takes on an almost monstrous presence through the narration, becoming a symbol of the family’s unresolved issues and torment.
The relationship between the siblings is well-developed, and the narrator’s portrayal of their interactions brings the story’s emotional depth to the forefront. Hendrix structures the book around the stages of grief, and this framework serves as a powerful skeleton for the narrative.
Listening to the audiobook, I found myself thinking about how grief and family dynamics play out over generations, as well as how characters—both human and puppet—hide behind masks.
While the horror elements, including unsettling scenes with puppets and even squirrels, are vividly rendered in the audiobook, the story is just as much about family miscommunications and finding common ground with estranged loved ones. If you listen to this audiobook, pay attention to how the narrator brings out the subtleties of these characters’ relationships and consider how parenting styles persist through generations—sometimes in the strangest, most terrifying ways.
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