The name of the 2023 horror game was house-themed, as you can see by the breakdown of 2023’s top ten horror books on Goodreads. If you adjust for the Stephen King of it all, who wins first place nearly every year by power of his sheer monolithic gravitational pull, The top two spots are Grady Hendrix’s “How to Sell a Haunted House” and T. Kingfisher’s “A House With Good Bones,” and the 6th spot Carissa Orlando’s “The September House.”
It’s the second in that list, “A House with Good Bones,” that I’m here in your inbox to talk about today.
Stats for A House with Good Bones:
rating: 3/5 stars
scare factor: 0.5/5
spook factor: 0.5/5
disturbing factor: 0.5/5
character: 5/5
plot: 2/5
T. Kingfisher sure can write, can’t she? I imagine she’s the type who starts typing away and five hours later has poured fourth half a novel. My evidence: she has forty-five books to her name, and upwards of eighty under her other nom de plume, Ursula Vernon.
I’ve previously read two of her works, 2020’s The Hollow Places, which I loved, and 2023’s What Moves the Dead, which I liked.
A House with Good Bones starts out when Sam Montgomery, a furloughed archaeoentomologist, has to go live with her Mom for a while at the house she grew up in - a house inherited from Sam’s judgmental grandmother. But things are… off. The house has been reverted to its exact state from when the grandmother was alive, racist confederate decor and all, and Sam’s mother is acting strange. And there’s something wrong with the rose garden.
This book missed the mark for me. Kingfisher is exceptionally good at fleshing out characters, especially her protagonists. That holds true in this book. And her stories are always extremely unique, even the ones that are retellings of other famous stories.
This book is also short, which I appreciate. It helps me keep on top of my digital library loans - the Libby Gods are unyielding, after all.
This book’s biggest flaw is that nothing really happens until about eighty percent in, and something big should have happened, at the very least, by the fifty percent mark. Sure, weird stuff occurs, which I won’t spoil for you here, but I never felt that “point of no return” that should happen fairly early in a horror book. It feels like a short story that was padded out to make a novella, which could explain the uneven pacing.
I would recommend this book to those who want a unique, spooky read that isn’t very disturbing. On the horror spice scale of 1-10, this is like… a 2? And that’s mostly for the last scene. It feels… cozy. It’s cozy horror.
What I’m reading: The Atrocity Engine by Tim Waggoner. Just started this last night through Netgalley. The summary describes it as Men in Black meets Hellraiser. Liking it so far, though it’s definitely more horror sci-fi than straight up horror.
What I’m watching: I just finished season two of Castle Rock. Oof, that ending is heartbreaking! Also rewatching Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) in tiny increments for a Dukes of Horror episode.
Keep it spooky, my friends!