A House with Good Bones joins Grady Hendrix's How to Sell a Haunted House on the list of weird-ass haunted house books that scared me more than I expected them to in 2023.

I've been meaning to read T. Kingfisher for a few years, but I decided to make A House with Good Bones my first because that cover is so so good, and because it's gotten some positive attention, but mostly because the premise sounded close to my familial situation. Close enough that when I described the book to the person I live with, her first response was, "Wow, isn't that kind of on-the-nose?"

I wanted the catharsis I suspected such on-the-nose-ness could provide, and I got it, but I also got dragged along to some creepy places that I didn't expect. Kingfisher asks the reader to do some heavier suspending of disbelief than I anticipated needing to do going in, but I think I prefer that to the more normal book I thought this would be?

Good for fans of nerdy protagonists, contemporary Southern Gothic, generational trauma, and weird fiction with a sense of humor.