How to Sell a Haunted House
Louise Joyner is a single mother building a life on the other side of the country when a call from her estranged brother Mark tells her their parents are dead, killed in a car accident. Going home to Charleston means facing the house she grew up in, the brother she can barely speak to, and their mother's life's work: a vast collection of handmade puppets and dolls filling every room.
Nancy Joyner was a puppeteer, and she left the house to Mark and the puppets to Louise — a division that reopens every grievance the siblings have ever had. But the argument over what to sell and what to keep turns out to be the smaller problem. Something in the house does not want to be cleared out, and one puppet in particular, a clown named Pupkin, has its own ideas about who this family belongs to.
Told in five parts named for the five stages of grief, Grady Hendrix's novel runs genuine terror alongside dark comedy and raw family drama, using a haunted house and an army of puppets to get at sibling rivalry, inherited trauma, and everything we take from our parents whether we want it or not.
A single mother who flies home to Charleston after her parents die, and has to settle her mother's estate against her brother's wishes.
The clown puppet Nancy kept all her life, and the thing in the house that will not let the family move on.
Louise and Mark's late mother, a puppeteer whose handmade puppets fill the house she leaves behind.
Louise's estranged brother, who inherits the house and clashes with her over the funeral and the sale.