Once again Grady Hendrix pushes the macabre envelope with an ingenious horror tale in the Hendrix way with the telling of a horror story about family secrets, dysfunction, a house which decides it needs more and, puppets, of course!
Louise must come home. She has not been home in years. She left her traumatic life behind her, had a daughter and moved away. Far away. She is happy with this life. But when both her parents are killed in a horrible car accident, she has to go home assuming she will have to plan everything because her loser of a brother Mark can barely function, even though he is an adult. He can’t handle his own life let alone plan a funeral.
So, she leaves her daughter and flies to Charleston. From her first step into her childhood home, something feels off. As she walks through the house with all the puppets and dolls from her mother’s Christian ministry, handmade by said mother, she begins to get a creepy feeling. Especially with the oldest puppet who had been her mother’s when she was young and then Mark and Louise’s. While in her childhood bedroom, she hears the television go on. She thinks her brother has finally arrived, but when she goes into the living room all she sees are two dolls sitting on a lounger looking as if they are watching television. She continues walking the inside of the house and AGAIN the television goes on. She just wants to believe there is something wrong with the remote.
And the puppets and dolls seem to give off an electricity. As if they know something she does not. As her anxiety increases, she decides to wait for her brother outside. But the inevitable starts when he arrives. They begin fighting because not only has he already planned the funeral, but he insists that in the will he gets the house. To Louise’s surprise, he is right. But why? She had always been told she would get the house and was counting on the money she would get selling it to pay for her young daughter’s schooling.
Mark and Louise come to an agreement and decide they will sell the house much to their relatives’ disapproval. For some reason they feel the house needs to stay in the family. But this is one thing the siblings can agree on. The house has a bad vibe and needs to go.
But unfortunately for them, the house knows what they want to do and will not let them under any circumstances sell. Thus begins the haunting, and the brother and sister who do not get along at all must somehow ban together and figure out how to put an end to what’s happening and try and find out just why it’s happening.
With spinetingling detail, How To Sell A Haunted House tells the story of a dysfunctional family who are in denial as to what took place years before Mark and Louise were born, and continued unknowingly as they grew up only to now have the house explode with anger at the thought they will not be there. The story reads like a horrible nightmare you have where you wake up sweating and your heart beating a thousand miles a minute, or a story someone tells in the dark around a campfire and goes BOO at the end!
You will never look at a puppet the same way again.
The End
Lisa's Cubby 