5/5 stars
A House With Good Bones, by T. Kingfisher (2023)
To me this was reminiscent of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in all the best possible ways. Haunted house meets slightly-off characters living in said house - are they just crazy, or is there really something wrong here? And is the creepy, uncanny thing that's wrong the house, or the people in it?
Sam is an archaeoentomologist who studies the bugs, or remains of bugs, found at archeological sites. She lives and works in Arizona, but her current job was put on hold and in the meantime, she decides to move home to North Carolina to live with her mother, Edith, while she waits for it to start back up. In part, this is because her brother informed her that their mother "seems off," based on his last visit.
Her mother lives in the house that belonged to Sam's grandmother (Edith's mother), Gran Mae, where they moved when Sam's father died. Until Gran Mae passed away, they all lived under her iron rule and demanding, religious (or, spiritual, anyway) eccentricities. But once she was gone, Edith fully took over the house, painting everything bright, whimsical colors.
When Sam arrives, she feels the wrong-ness immediately. First of all, it's not just her mother that seems off - in the garden of her grandmother's prized roses there are no bugs, and the neighborhood seems to have been overrun with vultures that perch on mailboxes and tree branches staring at her and the house. Her once vibrant, rebellious, hippy mother has become meek, scared, and reverent. She's repainted all the walls a stark white, and replaced fun artwork with Gran Mae's racist colonial paintings. Once vocal about her dislike for her mother, Edith won't tolerate a single word of criticism about her.
At first, Sam is convinced that her mother is starting to exhibit signs of dementia. But weird things are also happening around the house, too, like waking up to a one-room-only ladybug infestation. (And listen, my senior year college dorm room had a ladybug infestation and it was DISGUSTING. They're cute when there's one or two, but really gross when a quarter of your ceiling is black with them, and you can hear them flying around at night banging into the walls.) The more Sam digs - literally and figuratively - for answers, the weirder things get, until everything eventually takes a truly creepy turn.
This is my first Kingfisher read, and I must say I'm hooked. She's great at the slow-burn creep factor, writes intelligent and personable female characters, and has dark humor down to a science.
UP NEXT: The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson, by Ellen Baker
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