A House With Good Bones

October 1, 2022

Following the Hugo Award-winning Kingfisher's multi-starred Nettle & Bone, this Southern gothic features Sam Montgomery, concerned that her mother is acting strangely and switching things around at their house on Lammergeier Lane. Does it have anything to do with Sam's late (but not missed) grandmother? And are nasty family secrets buried beneath the rosebushes?

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Starred review from December 12, 2022
Hugo and Nebula Award winner Kingfisher (What Moves the Dead) goes Southern gothic (Waffle House visits included) in this hilarious and gruesome contemporary horror novel. After archaeoentomologist Sam Montgomery’s dig gets put on hold, she drives to her deceased grandmother’s house in rural North Carolina to spend some time with her mom. The vulture waiting for her on the mailbox doesn’t seem like a good omen, nor does the strange absence of insect life; her mother’s anxious, odd behavior; or Sam’s new, mysterious bouts of sleep paralysis. Sam digs into her family history in the hopes of discovering medical information and scientific explanations for the weirdness—but instead she finds deeply buried horrors that are out to destroy Sam; her mother; her grandmother’s rival, wildlife rehabilitator Gail; and even the local handyman, Phil. Sam makes a charmingly kooky narrator, and Kingfisher remains the best in the business at using horror and fantasy to explore abusive relationships and how to escape them. Horror fans who like a little whimsy on the way to a chilling climax won’t want to miss this.

February 15, 2023
Kingfisher (What Moves the Dead, 2022) presents a southern gothic with a twist, swapping out an isolated mansion for an unassuming tract home in a North Carolina subdivision. When her latest dig gets canceled, Sam, a 32-year-old archaeoentomologist--she studies bugs at archaeological sites--goes to stay with her mom in the home previously occupied by her abusive grandmother. When Sam arrives, her mom is acting as if she is under surveillance, and there are vultures surrounding the house. Immediately unsettled, readers will quickly fall into Sam's conversational narration as she injects nerdy humor, worries about her mom, and shares facts about bugs, her grandmother's rose bushes, and more. As each day passes, things get stranger and more dangerous, and it becomes undeniably clear that something supernatural is at work--and then the wild and witchy, action-packed final act is unleashed. For fans of stories that take the haunted-house trope and overlay occult themes with generational trauma, like The Good House, by Tananarive Due (2003) and How To Sell a Haunted House, by Grady Hendrix (2023).

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Starred review from February 1, 2023

Thirtysomething Sam Montgomery is worried about her mother. Living in the family home she inherited, her mom is erasing her own personality in favor of her abusive mother's--who is dead but apparently not gone. Desperate to determine whether her mom is suffering from delayed grief or early-onset Alzheimer's, Sam digs into the family's long-buried history, only to discover that her grandfather was an infamous sorcerer whose "sins of the father" are still being visited upon his descendants. Their house not only has good bones, it has strong teeth that are keeping out the stuff of nightmares. Told in the dry, sarcastic voice of wryly academic Sam, this starts out as a portrait of a dysfunctional family in a rational world. But readers are sucked into Sam's fears as that veneer of normalcy is broken down piece by piece, until the vultures are literally circling the house and the past unburies itself. VERDICT Highly recommended for lovers of Southern gothics, readers who like their horror to sneak up on them, and anyone who appreciates the voice of Kingfisher (What Moves the Dead), no matter what genre she's currently writing.--Marlene Harris

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.