A House With Good Bones by T. Kingfisher
A haunting Southern Gothic from an award-winning master of suspense, A House With Good Bones explores the dark, twisted roots lurking just beneath the veneer of a perfect home and family.
“Mom seems off.”
Her brother’s words echo in Sam Montgomery’s ear as she turns onto the quiet North Carolina street where their mother lives alone.
She brushes the thought away as she climbs the front steps. Sam’s excited for this rare extended visit, and looking forward to nights with just the two of them, drinking boxed wine, watching murder mystery shows, and guessing who the killer is long before the characters figure it out.
But stepping inside, she quickly realizes home isn’t what it used to be. Gone is the warm, cluttered charm her mom is known for; now the walls are painted a sterile white. Her mom jumps at the smallest noises and looks over her shoulder even when she’s the only person in the room. And when Sam steps out back to clear her head, she finds a jar of teeth hidden beneath the magazine-worthy rose bushes, and vultures are circling the garden from above.
To find out what’s got her mom so frightened in her own home, Sam will go digging for the truth. But some secrets are better left buried.
Review:
This book was not at all what I was expecting. For some reason the synopsis made me think of the movie “The Dark & the Wicked” which, if you are a horror fan and haven’t seen that movie, I insist you watch it as soon as possible. It’s sooooo creepy. I loved it. This book definitely had its creepy moments, but I wasn’t expecting it to be as funny as it was.
The story is told from the first-person point of view of Sam Montgomery, an archaeological entomologist (a bug person) who was working on a dig, but the dig got shut down because they found human remains at the dig site. She cannot work until the site has been thoroughly inspected and cleared before the dig can resume. Her brother recently visited their mother, and he’d told Sam that she seemed really off. It had been a while since Sam was last home, so she decides to go spend a few weeks with her mom while she waits for the site to open back up. She throws some things In her car and drives across the US.
Sam’s mom lives in Sam’s grandmother’s “aka Gran Mae” old house. The house sits in a cookie cutter suburb and was built in the 80s, so it’s not ancient by any means. The moment Sam gets home, she notices a few odd things. First, there’s a vulture sitting on the fence, but then Sam remembers that a woman up the street runs an animal rehab out of her home and she’s rehabbed vultures in the past, so she assumes it belongs to her. When Sam steps inside the house she notices the walls are all painted a dull Ecru color – definitely not her mom’s speed, and an old painting of a woman and a confederate soldier hangs on the wall – definitely more the speed of her racist dead grandmother than it is of her free-spirited mother. Other things Sam finds odd are her mother’s need to pray before meals and her refusing to say anything bad about her dead mother.
Sam finds the latter especially odd, seeing as how her mother and Sam’s “gran mae” had a volatile relationship. Sam’s father died when Sam was young, and to make ends meet her mother moved herself, Sam and her brother in with Gran Mae. Sam’s mother worked two jobs hoping to get herself back on her feet so she and the kids could get a place of their own, and since she worked a lot – Sam and her brother were left in the care of Gran Mae – and she wasn’t exactly the easiest person to get along with – in fact many would call her downright abusive, and Sam’s mother knew this, so why all of the sudden is she afraid to say anything bad about her?
Sam begins to rationalize. Maybe it was delayed grief? Could it be dementia? Possibly, but then Sam experiences weird things like waking up to a swarm of ladybugs in her bedroom one night, and on a couple of different occasions she hears someone whispering in her ear and stroking her head while she sleeps. Sure – it could be a very realistic nightmare and sleep paralysis, but when Sam finds a jar of buried teeth in the yard and then notices what appears to be a ghostly hand reaching out from beneath a rose bush while looking at an old graduation photo, she wonders if maybe there’s something wrong with the house.
Sam’s more of a believer in science, but could Gran Mae be haunting the place? Are the stories of Sam’s great grandfather being some sort of evil occultist true? Sam struggles with this because she doesn’t believe in witches and ghosts or anything paranormal, but she needs to find out what’s going on and quick because the vultures are multiplying and everyone knows vultures are attracted to the dead and dying.
As I said before, this was a fun read and I really enjoyed the characters. Sam is hilarious and no nonsense. I really liked the relationship between her and her mother. This is a fast read, and while I enjoyed it, it didn’t blow me away. I think a lot of that was because – as I mentioned earlier – I went into this one expecting to be unsettled from the get go. The heat and intensity didn’t really ramp up to a level of creepiness that made me squirm until roughly 17 chapters in and then it really took off – but it was well past the halfway mark.
This book was definitely fun to read. It’s a short one – clocking in around 250 pages, so I got through it quickly. It just wasn’t as creepy as I’d hoped. All in all, this was a fun read. Not the super creepy “keep me up at night” book I was hoping for, but it was enjoyable. Don’t get me wrong – I love a good horror comedy. I think had I known this author’s writing style, I would have known to expect more comedy than straight horror. I am definitely going to check out more of this author’s work, because I did really like her voice.
