Two of the biggest sources for my nightmares are haunted houses and puppets—both of which feature heavily in Grady Hendrix’s latest novel How to Sell a Haunted House. Why are we always drawn to the things that terrify us the most?
Hendrix is an author best known for his wildly popular horror novels, many of which have been (or are being) adapted for film and television including My Best Friend’s Exorcism, Horrorstör, We Sold Our Souls, and The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. He is also the author of the non-fiction book Paperbacks from Hell, which examines the history of the horror paperback boom of the 1970s and ’80s.
Hendrix is appearing at the Savannah Book Festival to present his latest novel—however it won’t be a typical author reading. Hendrix would “rather die than go to a book reading,” and he believes many people feel the same way.
“I felt like when people leave their house where they could be watching Netflix or having sex, they should be rewarded with something entertaining, so I do a one-man show.”
Hendrix’s one-man shows often feature visual elements and music, and usually focus on whatever subject he exhaustively researched for his latest book. When he wrote Final Girl Support Group, for example, he dove into serial killers and murder books. For We Sold Our Souls, Hendrix studied heavy metal music and its links to horror.
A book many Savannahians can relate to
When researching for How to Sell a Haunted House, naturally Hendrix dove deep into real estate.
“I think 46 to 49% of American homeowners believe they currently live in or previously lived in a haunted property,” said Hendrix. “I know New York state and California have disclosure laws where you have to disclose to a potential buyer if your house is generally considered haunted. That’s not so much because people don’t want to share a house with a ghost, but the original suit in New York was brought because the new homeowners moved in and realized they were a tourist destination for ghost tours, and they could no longer hang out on their front porch at night without people coming by and taking their pictures.”
I think many Savannahians can relate.
Hendrix doesn’t discredit the idea that hauntings are real. He used to work as an office manager a parapsychological research organization answering phone calls from people purporting to have supernatural experiences.
“Whether they are objectively true or not, they’re really powerful emotionally loaded experiences for people, so I think it would be a little ungracious to say they don’t exist, said Hendrix. “People experience them.”
Hendrix grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, so he is well familiar with the South’s penchant for hauntings.
“The thing I like about the South, and especially historic cities like St. Augustine or Savannah or Charleston is that everything sits on top of each other. You have all these different eras and interpretations of history sitting in a pretty small geographic base. You end up with some wild juxtapositions.”
The stuff of nightmares
How to Sell a Haunted House is about Louise and Mark, feuding siblings who must sell their childhood home after their parent pass away, but old traumas and secrets are stirred up. Some creepy inanimate objects get stirred up, as well.
“Puppets and dolls are always disgusting and scary,” said Hendrix. “They’re the inanimate object that when we look at it, it looks back. We always associate haunted puppets or dolls with porcelain faced Victorian dolls or old marionettes, but we surround ourselves with action figures and Funkos. We love imitation people.”
Hendrix drew from his own history with puppets when developing the character of Mark.
“Mark’s experiences are very similar to mine, right down to working with a radical puppet collective that performed an ill-conceived politically charged show for an elementary school,” explained Hendrix. “Ours was pre-9/11 and about the Pinochet regime in Chile and the disappeared and political torture. We thought we were doing those fourth graders a favor, opening their eyes to the world around them. The teachers did not feel similarly.”
Grief and mourning are another important theme of How to Sell a Haunted House. Hendrix even structured the book around the 5 Stages of Grief.
“So much about ghosts and haunted houses is about grief—it starts with a dead person,” explained Hendrix. “It starts with death and loss and absence.”
Hendrix points to the spiritualist movement of the 19th century as a source of inspiration when talking about how people deal with the paranormal and grief.
“[It] was a really potent force that straddled the world between female suffrage and abolishing slavery and getting the vote to disenfranchised groups and labor activism, and it was largely predicated on this idea that your dead loved ones weren’t necessarily inaccessible to you,” said Hendrix. “You could contact them, and they weren’t burning in Hell or some abstraction in Heaven. They were in a better place, and you would see them again. It was the first religion with a leadership role for women. But it was also predicated on grief. Hauntings have always been connected to the history of grief and mourning.”
“I wrote this book during lockdown, and I really missed my family and I wanted to make up an imaginary family that I could hang out with,” Hendrix continued. “When you’re writing about haunted houses, they’re always about family secrets, family curses that go on for generations, ancestors. I can’t think of any haunted house story that doesn’t revolve around a family.
“The reason I had Mark and Louise so opposed to each other is because I know a lot of families, my own included from time to time, where you fall in love and hate with different siblings. I just think that’s normal and very much part of a family. To me, if you’re going to talk about family, you’re going to talk about family fights…and ghosts.”
How to Sell a Haunted House is currently being adapted into a feature film by Legendary entertainment and Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures, with Hendrix writing the screenplay.
Hendrix’s appearance at The Savannah Book Festival promises to be a unique, fun, and educational experience.
“You’ll learn what to do if you have a haunted house and need to put it on the market,” said Hendrix. “And it’s hopefully entertaining. There are digressions into ghost sex which, unfortunately, was a category of horror fiction in the 80s, but I feel people need to be warned.”
If You Go >>
What: Grady Hendrix How to Sell a Haunted House at the Savannah Book Festival
When: 2:20-3:15 p.m., Feb. 17
Where: Cultural Arts Center, Ben Tucker Theater, 201 Montgomery St.
Cost: Free
Info: savannahbookfestival.org