A House With Good Bones (2023)-T. Kingfisher
Thoroughly creepy and entertaining but nothing groundbreaking
Content Warnings: Death, ghosts, mild gore, bugs, dark magic, cult, fatphobia, family abuse, racism
Representation: Plus sized MC, *very minor* Latina character
Favorite Quote: “They say you can’t go home again, but of course you can. It’s just that when you get there, somebody may have repainted and changed the fixtures around.”
A House with Good Bones is a contemporary horror novel about returning to your childhood home and finding it not as you left it. The book is mildly scary but contains well-crafted foreshadowing, undeniably disturbing content, and is well researched. A common theme throughout the book, however, is simply the love the MC has for her mother and the complicated dynamics of a dysfunctional family.
The book is set in North Carolina and follows the main character Sam, an archeological entomologist—who studies bugs at archeological sites—that uses her expertise in interesting ways throughout the book. After a dig that Sam had planned on attending gets canceled, Sam returns to her childhood home to stay with her mother. This home had once belonged to Sam’s grandmother Gran Mae, but after Gran Mae died Sam’s mother had redecorated the house to fit her colorful and eclectic style. This is what Sam expected to return to, but instead, found the house restored to how it was when Gran Mae was alive.
The weirdness of the situation escalates when Sam begins to notice her mother acting weird, particularly around mentions of Gran Mae. This coincides with weird experiences and discoveries that Sam takes it upon herself to solve, but insistently does not believe the situation to be supernatural at all. Sam, after all, is a scientist with a doctorate. She works with logical explanation to occurrences, no matter how strange.
The book does extremely well capturing strained family dynamics and generational conflict. Sam, her brother, and her mother, all have trauma from growing up with Gran Mae, but grapple with her legacy and how her own upbringing shaped her into the bigoted and manipulative adult they knew her as. It is a good read for fans of suspenseful stories, but is greatly lacking in representation and could dig deeper in many aspect of the build-up and the ultimate message.