Literature / How to Sell a Haunted House

"Strange noises, bad vibes, your mom and dad recently passed— Your house is haunted and I’m not selling it until you deal with that."

How to Sell a Haunted House is a 2023 novel by Grady Hendrix.

Louise Joyner, a product designer and single mother, discovers that her parents in Charleston have passed away and finds herself anxious. She doesn't want to return to her childhood home filled with her mother's creepy doll and puppet collection and her father's old work stuff. Louise is devastated by the loss of two of the people she loved the most and entering their home to be reminded of them.

Louise is also feuding with and doesn't want to confront her estranged brother, Mark, who in contrast to her, is stuck in their hometown in a spiral of being jobless as well disliking his sister's accomplishments. Still, they'll need to work together if they want to have any hope of getting the house repaired enough for sale. But something evil hides behind the walls, and soon both siblings find themselves having to put aside their differences to survive whatever haunts it.

No relation to the Korean TV series Sell Your Haunted House.

How to Sell a Haunted House contains examples of:

• The Alcoholic: It's obvious Mark has a drinking problem, as he's already wasted when he calls Louise to tell her about their parents and he spends a lot of the story drinking beer. Given what's happened to him over the course of his life, it's no surprise that he's likely drinking to cope with the unresolved trauma.
• Alternate Identity Amnesia: When someone is possessed by Pupkin, like Mark and his friends in the radical puppet collective, they go through long fugues and barely remember anything.
• An Arm and a Leg: Louise cuts off her brother's arm with a chainsaw in order to save him from possession by Pupkin (who is on that arm).
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Aunt Gail doesn't bat an eye when Louise explains about the house and Pupkin being demonically possessed. But ghosts? No way! The Bible says souls go to the lord upon death.
  • Louise has this at several points, played for drama and laughs. When asked if she believes in higher powers, she says "no", and Mark reminds her she cut off his arm because she very seriously believed one was threatening them.
• Artistic License – Medicine: Invoked. The family story about Freddie's death has several holes in it if you understand how tetanus actually works. Louise figures this out herself. The way the story goes, Freddie stepped on a rusty nail and died of lockjaw that very day—but the incubation period of tetanus is at least ten days. You don't just get a puncture wound and keel over with your jaw stuck shut. It's a hastily-thrown-together cover story to hide that Freddie actually drowned because Nancy was left to babysit him but wandered away instead.
• Big Bad: Pupkin the living puppet serves as the main antagonist of the book, being the entity that's haunting the Joyner house.
• Big Damn Heroes: Louise finds herself overwhelmed by living puppet Pupkin and his monster, a giant, screaming golem constructed out of the combination of all of her mother's dolls and puppets, and is in serious trouble. Luckily her brother arrives with his giant, multi teethed Not-So-Imaginary Friend to take down the golem.
• Big Fun: Aunt Gail's friend Barb, who helps with exorcisms, is a short, overweight asian woman with a happy and bubbly personality and no sense of personal space.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: Louise's family turns out to be extremely dysfunctional. Her brother Mark resents Louise due to an incident that happened in the book's backstory which only he remembers. Pupkin himself turns out to be the ghost of Louise and Mark's uncle Freddie who died decades before the book at the age of five because their mother Nancy accidentally left him to drown when she was seven. Nancy's mother couldn't stand to keep Nancy around after her son had died due to Nancy's negligence, and left her in various other homes her entire life while swearing people to secrecy. Further, Nancy's mother destroyed all pictures and records of Freddie, and forbade anyone to speak of him while she was alive. At another point a five year old Louise almost murders Mark at the behest of Pupkin, but her parents hush it up as mere carelessness, even gaslighting Mark when he remembers the event as a teen. This has led to massive degrees of dysfunction within the family as they try to erase Freddie's memory and Louise almost killing Mark, and put on fake smiles. The latter point leads to Louise and Mark's parents being extremely doting on Mark to the point of indulgence over guilt for continuously gaslighting him. This, mixed with their parents not telling Louise why they indulge him or her role in those events, makes Louise resent Mark for getting preferential treatment and getting away with destroying her things. From Marks perspective, his anger is perfectly justified once he remembers "Louise" trying to kill him (though not yet knowing about Pupkin), and that their parents seem not to care about it, and gaslight him about it even happening.
• Bi The Way: It's mentioned early on that Louise has dated both men and women in the past.
• Bittersweet Ending: On the bitter side, Louise's parents are still dead, and she still mourns them and Mark has lost an arm, but on the bright side, she's reconciled with Mark and the house is no longer haunted as Louise was able to deal with the unresolved trauma of Freddie's death and allow him to rest in peace.
• Book Ends: The story opens with Louise trying to explain death to her five year old daughter, and ends with her successfully explaining death to Pupkin/the ghost of her five year old uncle Freddy.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Mark when he was younger was a supremely talented, eager and good looking actor. He would regularly upstage other people in school performances. However, he grew arrogant of his abilities and indulged in the wilder party side of Theater, blowing off practices and rehearsals— but still wowing audiences with improvisation. This eventually makes him into a Broken Ace when he "parties out of college" and spends his adult life never achieving much of anything. This is later revealed to be only partly his fault, as a series of traumas and events well before and during college derailed his life.
• Character Development:
  • Louise: From a Control Freak, as noted below, into someone willing to ask for help and accept that the world she isn't always rational and no longer denying various repressed memories. This is especially ironic, as the last letter she got from her mother Nancy posthumously implored her to take care of Mark, as she was all he had. By the end of the book, she is instead depending on him.
  • Mark: From a self-centered Ungrateful Bastard unwilling to make an effort, into someone who willingly gives up half of his inheritance after reconciling with Louise.
• Control Freak: Louise. Despite frequently noting that as a mom and "the responsible one" she doesn't get to inconvenience others and instead has to deal with others inconveniencing her, most of her dealings with her daughter Poppy, brother Mark, parents and people in general have her either try to order them around, or blatantly lie to manipulate them into getting her way.
• Creepy Doll: The house abounds with creepy dolls and puppets, in particular the Mark and Louise dolls, two child-sized dolls their mom bought when the real deal had both moved out. The first sign of the haunting is that the TV keeps turning back on with the Mark and Louise dolls in front of it. However, they might be haunted, but they're not evil. The worst thing they actually do is run up the electricity bill.
• Demonic Possession: Wearing Pupkin for too long results in this. Mark and his radical puppet collective were almost completely taken over when "exploring the primal role" of Pupkin. Pupkin later turns Mark into a Meat Puppet, which requires Louise to chop off his arm. Later on, Poppy is affected this way too, but is thankfully saved without having to lose any limbs. Thankfully, Nancy seems to have never been affected in this way.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: If Pupkin weren't an evil haunted puppet, he would just be a regular abusive relative—he physically and emotionally abuses Mark and Louise, pits them against each other so they can't compare notes or team up against him, and is protected from consequences by people's refusal to discuss what's going on or even admit that anything bad is happening.
• Eye Scream: During his first attack, Pupkin jams a needle into Louise's eye. Louise worries that it ends up blinding her, but Mark reveals to her that, apart from some blood in her eye, it didn't do any lasting damage.
• Five Stages of Grief: The book follows Mark and Louise Joyner as they lose their parents and have to deal with them being gone as well as trying to sell the haunted house they lived in. The book is divided into five parts, each titled over the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance) and each part explores one of those feelings. Their parents, on the other hand, were stuck fast in the 'denial' stage, which caused most of the animosity between the siblings. And so were their grandparents. Pupkin's haunting was initially started because Louise's grandmother refused to come to terms with Nancy causing Freddie's death.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Played with. While initially Louise and Mark seem like a textbook case, with Louise being a high-achieving single mother with a successful career, and Mark a spottily-employed bum with an alcohol problem, it turns out things aren't quite so clear-cut. Mark is accomplished in his own right and much of his "flakiness" is actually the result of severely traumatic events, and Louise has her own issues that she never dealt with.
• The "Fun" in "Funeral": The funeral for Louis and Mark's parents is quite goofy. Their mother was a puppeteer so the mourners are all the city's puppeteers with their puppets and Mark even gives her a kazoo song as a final tribute she would have wanted.
• Ghostly Goals: Pupkin has a fairly simple one, he wants to be loved, to be paid attention to, to play, and to never be left alone in the dark and cold. For most of Louise and Mark's life, this wasn't a problem as Nancy and they did all of the above. But when she passes away...
  • The above goals make a tragic amount of sense considering Pupkin was Freddy, a five year old, and is buried in the family's back yard. A.k.a., a cold dark box.
• Glurge Addict: Nancy, as evidenced by her figurine, doll, and puppet collections. This was actually a manifestation of her Fatal Flaw of being unable to deal with negativity, which drove Louise and Mark apart because she was unable to properly handle Pupkin getting Louise to nearly drown Mark.
• Golem: In the climax, the Big Bad causes the various dolls and puppets that make up the collection in the Haunted House of the book to come to life and combine into a living, screaming golem monster.
• Haunted House: The plot follows Mark and Louise Joyner's attempts to sell their recently deceased parents' house which is haunted. They end up having to fend off living, possessed dolls and puppets, noises in the attic and other scary shenanigans.
• Hollywood Exorcism: Louise and her extended family take the Pupkin possessed Poppy to be exorcised. Problem was, it wasn't a demon, but a ghost.
  • Mercy suggests earlier to ask her mother Gail to do a Banishing Ritual on the house, the cleanse it of the bad vibes. It wouldn't have worked since Pupkin is a ghost, not a demon, with his body buried in the backyard. In addition to that, he can influence family members to recreate his puppet body as an anchor even if the original were destroyed.
• Kids Are Cruel: Pupkin, thinks and feels like a 5 year old child would, and has few if any compunctions about hurting others. Considering he is the ghost of Freddy, who has been coddled his entire unlife, he's only gotten crueler and now monstrous.
• Kill It with Fire: Mark burns down the puppet collective's HQ to break Pupkin's hold on them, and later the siblings burn Pupkin on the grill. It doesn't take. Pupkin simply mind-controls Poppy, Louise's daughter, into recreating him.
• I Reject Your Reality: A tragic example. After the incident where Pupkin tried to kill Mark, Louise buried him in the backyard to get away from him...and the next day, found him sitting on her parents bed, all cleaned up. Since no one knew she buried Pupkin, the logical conclusion was that he dug himself up, but this was a bridge too far for Louise—so she decided none of it had ever happened. She never buried Pupkin, Pupkin was never anything but a regular puppet, and Mark almost drowning was an accident.
• Ironic Nursery Tune: Nancy Joyner's theme song for Pupkin. It presumably wasn't ironic when she was doing performances for children, but it certainly is now.
  Pupkin here! Pupkin here!
  Everybody laugh! Everybody cheer!
• Love Imbues Life: This is the theory behind Pupkin's existence, that Nancy gave it so much love and attention that it came to life, much like the The Velveteen Rabbit, but played for horror. Subverted though, as Pupkin was a ghost the whole time. Played straight with Mark's imaginary friend and dog Spider, which was brought to life thanks to years of being believed in by Mark and some of Pupkin's influence.
• Not-So-Imaginary Friend: When they were kids, Mark and Louise both imagined that Pupkin could really talk to them. Turns out, that wasn't their imagination. Pupkin also brings Mark's imaginary friend Spider, a demonic spider puppet dog, to life and he later turns on Pupkin to help Mark.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: The ghost here is able to create disturbances and bring puppets and dolls to life. It's able to turn Mark's imaginary friend into a real monster, and is able to create a giant golem constructed of the various dolls and puppets that used to belong to the heroine's deceased mother. It inhabits a glove puppet which can take control of its user and even being destroyed doesn't stop it as it will simply possess someone and force them to recreate it unless its Unfinished Business is cleared.
• Parental Neglect: While the Joyner parents never failed to provide for the siblings' material needs and did honestly love them, their pathological aversion to any kind of real negativity meant they fell down on the job when it counted most. Obvious indicators of trauma went totally ignored—after the incident with the puppet collective, Mark was so clearly fucked up that random people he ran into took pity on him and helped him get home for free, but when he actually got home, Nancy acted like everything was normal and just asked why he didn't have Pupkin.
• Parents as People: The Joyners did honestly love and want the best for their children, but two people with a complete inability to deal with negative emotions simply were not capable of dealing with the tragedies that bedeviled their family, and their default 'pretend it never happened' approach drove Mark and Louise apart and caused Mark to enter a downward spiral as their spoiling him was no substitute for actually helping him deal with his trauma.
• Perverse Puppet: The Big Bad Pupkin is a living glove puppet with an exaggerated smiling face, and is possessed by the ghost of a young boy who died decades ago. Pupkin starts haunting the house the boy lived in after the boy's sister dies, but while it initially starts as just vandalism, he eventually escalates to outright attempted murder.
• Poor Communication Kills: The entire plot could've been avoided had the family actually talked about their trauma instead of trying to pretend it never happened to the point where neither Louise nor Mark even know about it. The whole haunting is because instead of dealing with Freddie's death due to Nancy's negligence, his mother tried to cover it up and instead just abandoned Nancy with relatives and said Freddie's death was due to lockjaw. Freddie's spirit became restless without proper Due to the Dead, and Louise couldn't fix the haunting until the end of the book because she didn't know its source. Louise and Mark were also driven apart because Nancy in turn refused to acknowledge what Pupkin had made Louise do. Mark and Louise can only fix the mess their parents and grandparents caused when they compare notes to solve the mystery of Pupkin.
• Spoiled Brat: Several, and subverted. Louise thought Mark was this, except much though not all of it was due to childhood trauma she herself caused, and which her parents tried to soothe without actually talking about it. Then in a meta sense there's Pupkin, which was justified in that he was "enabled" from years of Nancy essentially fawning over him and feeding him emotional energy.
• The Stoic: Louise and Mark's father "did not do emotions". Louise remembers that when she accidentally taped over the recording of a big presentation at an economics conference, instead of getting angry or punishing her he just said "That'll teach me to have a big head".
• Teens Are Monsters: Mark, who kicked/punched a hole in his bedroom wall, and destroyed Louise's favorite watercolors, among other things. Justified and downplayed, he had uncovered a repressed memory of Louise nearly drowning him. When his parents flatly denied that had happened, he felt gaslighted and angry. Louise herself had repressed the memory, so he seemed crazy to her, and their parents were helpless as he acted out, feeling highly guilty but unwilling to address the issue. While the book leaves it ambiguous, the fact Louise got the watercolors as a gift the day of the "incident" with Mark could have made him target them specifically for the association.
• Trauma-Induced Amnesia: Crossing over into Repressed Memories and willfull denial. The straight example is Mark after Louise almost drowned him when he was five at Pupkin's command, and Louise mostly just willfully denies or represses the memory out of shame.
• The Unfavorite: Both Mark and Louise see themselves as this; from Louise's point of view, Mark was consistently spoiled, his bad behavior passed without comment, and his parents supported his slacker lifestyle, while Louise had to work for everything with no help; when she got an award, she wasn't allowed to put it up because Mark didn't have one, and while Louise got a scholarship to a good college, Mark had his college paid for. From Mark's perspective, Louise was bossy, rude, and ungrateful, and his figuratively getting away with murder was nothing compared to Louise literally getting away with (attempted) murder and his Pupkin-related trauma being entirely ignored. The reality is more complicated, but largely boils down to their parents being unable to handle either child's issues; Rather than deal with Louise nearly killing Mark at Pupkin's behest, they pretended it didn't happen and spoiled Mark to make up for gaslighting him over it.
• Undead Child: Pupkin turns out to be Freddie, Louise and Mark's uncle who died at the age of five. His childish behavior is because he is a child.
• Un-person: Freddy, Nancy's brother and Louise and Mark's late uncle, died when he was five from stepping on a nail and getting lockjaw. The event was so traumatic that their grandmother destroyed all pictures of him, clothes, and toys, and even forbade anyone from speaking of him while she was alive. It's bad enough the family has to correct themselves on the fact that Nancy was not an only child. It's actually worse; he drowned because of seven-year-old Nancy's negligence.
• Unfinished Business: One of the reasons behind the haunting. Nobody ever properly dealt with Freddy's death, and Louise ultimately ends the haunting by digging up his bones and reburying him next to her mother.

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