Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐/5

Haunted house stories may be my favorite horror sub-genre. Some of my favorite horror books—99 Fear Street, The Haunting of Hill House, The Witching Hour—are either about or set in big, old spooky houses. So it’s no surprise that this title, A House With Good Bones by T Kingfisher, called to me.

Since finishing the book, I’ve learned that T. Kingfisher is the adult fiction pseudonym of children’s author and illustrator Ursula Vernon. Whether she’s doing picture books, webcomics, or Southern Gothic mysteries like A House With Good Bones, it’s clear that she has a gift for storytelling and imagery by any name.

When Sam Montgomery, an archaeo-entymologist, returns to her family home in North Carolina after being furloughed from her dig, she’s startled to find that it seems to have gone backward in time. The rooms her mom had once painted with bright colors are now covered in bland off-whites, and artwork long stored in the back corners of the attic is up on the walls again. In fact the house looks just like it did back when Sam’s grandmother, a rose-obsessed old lady with strong traditional (AKA racist and patriarchal) values, owned it. Well, except for the vultures that now seem to be always watching the house. And Sam’s mom is different too—she’s anxious and jumpy, almost as if the ghost of Gran Mae is looking over her shoulder…As Sam tries to pinpoint a cause for her mother’s change in personality, she befriends the neighborhood handyman Phil, as well as Gayle, the nature-loving neighbor who was Gran Mae’s rival. As they help Sam try to learn the truth about her family, none of them suspects the terrible secrets overgrown by Gran Mae’s beloved rose bushes.

Having seen mixed reviews for A House With Good Bones ahead of reading it, I wasn’t sure what to expect. It turned out to be a very solid read. I really enjoyed Sam as a main character. A nerdy, plus-size protagonist who likes pineapple on pizza is all right with me. The interesting facts about bugs, birds and roses that she drops throughout the narrative added a fascinating flavor to what is altogether a familiarly-structured haunted house/garden mystery.

The story wraps up cleanly, with no obvious dangling plot threads. Kingfisher does a great job sprinkling bits of information throughout the story and bringing them back later in satisfying ways—like Edie’s notes to herself, and the mentions of the underground children as boogeymen wielded by Gran Mae. The final part of the book where Sam and her party finally expose and are forced to deal with the thing that’s really haunting the house is genuinely creepy and unsettling in a way that I didn’t see coming.

A House With Good Bones does have some minor weaknesses. I didn’t love the fourth-wall breaking Sam occasionally engages in as the narrator—where she turns aside to the reader to say things like, “Don’t judge me,” or “I was under a lot of stress, okay?” I think perhaps this was meant to come off as self-consciousness, a humanizing character trait for Sam, but it was annoying enough to take me out of the story. Additionally, the process of Sam trying to learn the cause of her mom’s off-ness felt slightly drawn-out to me, though not to a point where I wanted to put the book down.

But there is so much to love about this book. The relationship between Sam and her mom is great—warm and companionable, with enough mother-daughter banter to keep it from being sickeningly sweet. It’s clear that part of their bond comes from the shared experience of each growing up in their own way under the iron fist of Gran Mae. And I really like the little touch of Sam finding a way to understand and empathize with her grandmother by the end. This is a novel that quietly says a whole lot about dealing with generational trauma, a theme that will resonate with basically anyone who’s ever had a family.

This novel of vultures, roses and ladybugs pulls the reader in with its Southern charm and good humor, and then gets under the skin with its creeping sense of dread as the situation at the Montgomery house slowly deteriorates. An easy four stars. This is my first T. Kingfisher novel, but I do forsee myself becoming a repeat customer.

Are you a T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon fan? What did you think of A House With Good Bones by T Kingfisher? What’s your FAVORITE haunted house book? Step into my comments and we’ll talk about it!