Book Review -- A House With Good Bones, by T. Kingfisher -- A Horror Comedy Delight

 

Cover Image courtesy of
Tor Nightfire

Do you note how NetGalley asks if you would recommend this book to others? Well, I was talking about and recommending this book before I was finished with it. It’s horror lite, most certainly. But it’s clever and funny and well worth the read. I was reading this, also, upon a visit home to my mom after a bit of a health scare. My mom lives in my grandparents old house in a rather rural neighborhood. Her best friend is a gardener and bird enthusiast, and vultures are a common sighting. So maybe it was karma that led me to this book.

I’m also still viewing the world of entertainment with that Bechdel test lingering at the back of my mind, and T Kingfisher passes that metric without out batting an eyelash. Sam is a bug scientist. She's single, and while the story has a potential love interest in Phil the handyman, Phil is far from the center of attention. Because Mom has been acting weird. Sam needs to know what’s up because the house, that had once been filled with the bright eclectic flavor of her mom, has slowly returned to the "nice and normal" ambiance of Sam's grandmother who, in hindsight, turns out to have been not very nice at all in her quest for normalcy. Also, the local witch down the road has a haven for vultures, and those vultures are very keen on giving attention to Sam's mom's house.

As strange and suspicious events continue to unfold, involving a lack of bugs in the garden and mom's insistence to adhere to grandma's outdated ways, Sam embarks on an investigation that unravels a few unsettling truths about her family history that author Kingfisher masterfully connects to some outrageously true history connected to L. Ron Hubbard.

It’s such a clever and creative little horror story, with how it weaves the seemingly unrelated horror elements into a cohesive whole by the end. I want to give spoilers so bad with this, but I’ll refrain. Suffice to say that it gets five stars and is near guaranteed to entertain.

Free Reads On NetGalley, Plus a Review on Piñata, by Leopoldo Gout

If you aren’t familiar with it, NetGalley is great. It's an opportunity for writers to get their work out to readers for free in order to coax honest reviews of their recently published (or soon to be published) work. It’s an opportunity for readers to get a free look at new books by both new and established writers before the general reading audience sees it.

Of course there’s a catch. Readers are expected to leave a rating or review of the book. But this isn’t like Goodreads, where there's that chance of a new author giving you what for if the review isn’t what they want to hear. No, NetGalley is a trusted intermediary in that process. There's no chat room where author and reviewer might virtually bump into each other. NetGalley is the barrier between the two, giving the reader the chance to give an honest opinion and the author a chance to garner thoughtful feedback for themselves and, potentially, more readers.

I've prefaced this blog with a pitch for NetGalley for two reasons. First, I am going to review a newly released horror novel, Piñata, by Leopoldo Gout. I found it on NetGalley. Second, I'm pitching my own new release, Perfect Sacrifices, which isn’t currently on NetGalley, but will be soon. Perfect Sacrifices is book three of the Perfect Prophet series, and you can find books one and two (Prophet Reborn) on NetGalley for a limited time, starting now. I am so happy with the completed third book, and I hope horror readers will love it. But it needs reviews before people will consider it, and there is a bit of backstory that comes easier if you’re familiar with the first two books. Perfect Prophet and Prophet Reborn have decent professional reviews, but it's the regular reader reviews that people look for. The more, the merrier. So please feel free to check out and review Perfect Prophet and Prophet Reborn for free at NetGalley for the next three months. You can post those reviews elsewhere too, if you want to make an author happy. Here's a link where you can sign up or login if you’re already a member…

https://www.netgalley.com/auth/login

And here’s a link to Perfect Prophet  and Prophet Reborn specifically…

https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/?text=Diane+M.+Johnson

Onto the real reason you’re here, a review on Piñata by Leopoldo Gout.

https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/book/267318

First, thank you to NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for the ARC of this intriguing horror novel. I’m a sucker for horror with cultural or historical roots, and Piñata easily fills that bill. Also, I picked this book up on the tail end of reading a book that failed the Bechdel test, and that metric is still at the back of my mind, so… This book has several female main characters who talk to each other about things beyond the men in their lives. Bravo, Mr. Gout. You passed the test!

I enjoyed this horror piece, about a Mexican descended family from NY who travel to Mexico because of mom's work as an architect. It doubles as an opportunity for the woman's school age daughters to get a taste of their heritage but, teenage girls being who they are, it doesn’t end well. But the teenage apathy isn’t the worst of the family’s problems. The mom, Carmen, is a woman in a male dominated field, and the site that her firm is helping renovate into a hotel is an old church with a dark historical past.

The near decimation of the Mexican indigenous population at the hands of conquistadors and Spanish missionaries has left a centuries old stain on this location of the world, and the history and cultural relevance of the piñata is at its core. Once part of Nahua rituals of death and rebirth, it has now become a party favor, a mockery of its original importance and meaning. Until Carmen's youngest daughter Luna shows up and introduces herself to the long silenced spirits of the past who seek revenge. Luna becomes a sort of conduit for those vengeful spirits in a way that that little girl in the movie Poltergeist was used by the voices on a static filled TV. Sort of. I’m not going to provide any more possible spoilers except to say that the idea that Poltergeist uses—the gentrification over sacred land, is an easy comparison.

I enjoyed the book, most definitely, although the build to the horrific end was a little slower than I would have preferred. The slow build pulls the rating down maybe more than it should. I don’t know, maybe it was the writing style that was fine…but it didn’t quite fill me with the looming terror that I felt it should have. Until the end. It ramped up quickly by the last quarter of the book.