'In this ordinary North Carolina suburb, family secrets are always in bloom...
'Samantha Montgomery pulls into the driveway of her family home to find a massive black vulture perched on the mailbox, staring at the house. Inside, everything has changed. Gone is the eclectic warmth Sam expects; instead the walls are a sterile white. Now, it's very important to say grace before dinner, and her mother won't hear a word against Sam's long-dead grandmother, who was the first to put down roots in this small southern town. The longer Sam stays, the stranger things get. And every day, more vultures circle overhead...'
T. Kingfisher has quickly become one of my favourite writers over the last couple of years, her ability to turn ordinary, mundane settings into places filled with horror that gets under your skin has been superb; and I love that each of their horror stories has done something very different, and brought a new kind of horror to the table.
A House With Good Bones tells the story of Samantha 'Sam' Montgomery, a young archaeoentomologist who was ready to go and spend weeks on a new dig site identifying ancient insect specimens. However, when the dig is postponed Sam is left hundreds of miles from home, a home that she can't go back to thanks to having given up her lease for the dig. Faced with nowhere else to go, and wanting to spend some time with her mother after her brother giving her poor reports on her health, Sam heads to her childhood home in North Carolina.
A house that they inherited from Sam's grandmother, the house had been thoroughly claimed as their own over the years. The walls painted bright, cheerful colours, old photographs taken down in exchange for more enjoyable art, and a general happier atmosphere. But when Sam arrives her mother, Edith, has painted the house plain white, family pictures now hang on the wall, and her grandmother's pictures take centre place. As Sam observes her mother she sees other changes, Edith makes them pray before dinner, she tells Sam off for swearing, and she won't hear anything bad said about her deceased mother. Edith seems completely changed; not to mention the physical weight loss she seems to have gone through. Sam begins to worry.
But as she spends more time in the house she begins to think that something else might be wrong in her childhood home. Strange things start to happen. The garden is devoid of insects, but her room is swarmed by ladybugs in the middle of the night. Things seem to move and shift place on their own. And she begins to have strange dreams, vivid night terrors where a strange voice whispers in her ear, and something strokes her hair. Sam, ever the scientist, tries to find rational explanations for it all; but soon has to face the notion that perhaps her grandmother isn't really gone after all.
One of the best things about Kingfisher's work is that it takes time to build. You're allowed to spend some time getting to know the characters and the locations at first, seeing their ordinary lives and their mundane day to day activities, before the unusual begins to creep in. Small things start to happen that make you feel a little ill at ease, before she gives you a moment that absolutely makes your skin crawl and makes you say 'nope' over and over again. A House With Good Bones absolutely repeats this trick, as you spend a good portion of the book following Samantha, seeing her settle back into her childhood home, and watching her relationship with her mother.
We don't know this family, but through Sam it very quickly becomes clear that Edith isn't acting normally, and despite never having met the character before Sam's worry for her mother immediately sells to the reader how everything is off, how this isn't real. This undercurrent of things being wrong plays throughout the early parts of the book, so that even when we're spending time with Sam as she tries to do some of her work, or simply just watches TV and drinks wine it never quite feels normal. Then the really creepy shit starts and it makes your skin crawl all the more because this is a person that you've come to like, and because despite expecting something bad to happen you still aren't prepared for it.
This book definitely feels more in line with The Twisted Ones for me, as far as Kingfisher's other horror books go. It has that similar style where you're drawn into a fairly ordinary life, peppered with some unusual and interesting characters, and watch as your heroine tries to go about their life when these awful things start happening. That was the book that made me fall in love with this authors work, so revisiting that kind of feel, yet being absolutely its own thing, was wonderful.
The book also gives the reader a fat protagonist. So often you don't get that. There's a growing trend to have larger women take a leading role in books, though this often tends to be in romance novels from what I've seen. I'm not sure I've ever really seen a larger female protagonist in a horror book before; especially one who's smart, capable, and can kick arse when she needs to. And whilst there's no overt romance in the book, there's definitely every indication that she's won the handsome guy over and could have him if she wanted. She's smart, pretty, capable, fun, and fat; and that last one is something that we absolutely do not get enough of, and one that I love to see.
A House With Good Bones is an incredibly engaging and entertaining read. I quickly found myself sucked into the book, and kept reading because it was so hard to put down. And I know you should't judge books on appearance, but the hardback version of the book is a thing of beauty. The dust jacket has wonderful art on the cover, and the book beneath is a beautiful purple with a gold embossed cover. Even when you open it up you're treated to a gorgeous design on the inside covers. It's worth getting just for how pretty the book is; but, if you do crack it open and give it a read you're getting a phenomenal story too.
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