This involves dealing with her washout of a brother, Mark, who their parents always favoured despite his dropping out of college and struggling to hold a job. When Louise’s parents die tragically in a car accident, she leaves her five-year-old daughter, Poppy, with her ex and travels back home to Charleston to settle their affairs. Hendrix’s latest, How to Sell a Haunted House, is the near-perfect distillation of this form: a novel that is both very funny and truly scary. It’s that he both takes the piss and commits totally to the premise (whether it’s demonic possession, vampires or serial killers) that has me coming back to his work. But if all Hendrix did was satirise worn horror tropes, I would have lost interest. His choice of titles such as My Best Friend’s Exorcism, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires and The Final Girl Support Group reinforces this tongue-in-cheek attitude to the genre.

This was evident in the ‘‘Freaky Friday’’ column Hendrix wrote for Tor.com (since shifted over to his mailing list, ‘‘Paperbacks From Hell’’), where, with nostalgic glee, he showcased the numerous horror paperbacks from the ’70s and ’80s that fell on the wrong side of that divide. Moreso than his contemporaries (including King), Hendrix recognises that with horror fiction, there’s a fine line between the chilling and the ridiculous. Since picking up My Best Friend’s Exorcism back in 2016, I’ve eagerly read (and reviewed) each of his subsequent novels. Over the last several years, I’ve drifted away from core (mainstream) horror fiction to the extent that I haven’t read the last few Stephen King novels (something that I could not have imagined less than a decade ago).

How to sell a haunted house review