A House With Good Bones by T KIngfisher

I would like to thank Lydia from Titan for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Titan

Published – 28/3Kindle 5/4 hardback

Price – £17.99 hardback £9.49 Kindle eBook

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 and little-missed 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…

Ever ponder why it’s the house that we call haunted and we don’t like to focus on the people that are haunting us? It is as if we want step away from trying to have any connection with the potential ghostsand say it is just the environment that is the problem. Homes are powerful. They are our place of safety from the outside world when we grew up; but they can be painful memories and where our futures got shaped. Many of us have easily disproved that you can actually go home again but metaphorically returning to where it all started we are never going to be the people we once were and who knows what awaits for us this time when we return. This is part of T Kingfisher’s delightfully creepy A House With Good Bones where a young woman finds her childhood home unsettling and her mother acting very strangely.

Samantha is a thirty-two-year-old archaeoentomologist (studies insects in ruins and please do not mention Jurassic Park) a dig has ended prematurely and due to unexpected developments her home is not available so she agrees to return back to North Carolina and stay with her mother for a few weeks. Samantha and her mother are great friends and the house is colourful, fun and yet upon her return it has a vulture on the fence; all trace of colour in the house has been painted over; the garden is in full bloom and yet pristine and its starting to look like the house Samantha and her mother stayed in when they had to stay with Gran Mae – a controlling, racist and slightly scary grandmother who constantly criticised her children and grandchildren. Samantha’s mother is withdrawn, losing weight, avoiding swearing and very not herself. Fearing her mother is not well Samantha starts to dig deeper into the situation but finds there are many family secrets buried deep in this house.

This tale is all about a steadily darkening atmosphere and yet stays on the milder side of horror being far more focused on the horror of family relationships and a very strange house than going for full throttle scares. Instead it’s an intriguing southern gothic mystery in a nice suburban street that you shouldn’t expect weird things to happen in. Samantha is a rationalist – they look at the facts and interpret them so they are fairly hard to unsettle and the tale she tells us refreshingly avoiding going over the top on jump scares and blood splatters (well ok there is a little blood now and then). Samantha is funny, intelligent observant and her voice is just a pleasure to read – you get a sense of who they are; her hopes and fears and very much root for them to sort things out. It also means when things do finally go outside of known reality when Samantha gets worried so do we.

The fascinating angle for me in this story is family relationships. How generations either get on or sometimes not. I really enjoyed that Samantha and her mother actually have a hugely positive relationship with laughs; honesty and obvious love for each other coming across. Firstly we don’t get enough of these types of relationships in fiction but also it makes us worry what has happened as she is clearly not the woman Samantha remembers and described to us. Kingfisher plays onto the fears we get when we notice our parents are now getting old, forgetful and seem now to need us to look after them. A very genuine fear many of us can relate to. Alongside this in exploring the more toxic relationship of Gran Mae we get a look at generational divides when you have relatives who bring their own upbringing and fears to us and expect us to accept and obey them. That special pressure that only families can have regards asking are you allowed to argue back to the people you’re supposed to love? The ability of the past to control the future generations is a hugely strong theme of the tale and one we all have to battle to move away from.

But of course this isn’t just a family drama. One of the group is dead for example and steadily we move from things simply that aren’t feeling right to something more supernatural. Kingfisher gently darkens the tale – mysterious bug appearances; hidden family secrets; possible scandals and slowly a growing fear that a few things in this house actively wish Samantha harm. As each day in the book passes things get more eerie until we finally find out what is going on. Then for good measure we go into even stranger territory for the tale’s much more supernatural-focused finale that neatly sows up many of the mysteries we have explored. I would never class this as full-on horror but it’s an eerie unsafe journey that awaits Samantha and her family and new friends.

This is a hugely enjoyable tale from a writer now well known for delivering strange stories, great characters and a fresh perspective on how to scare us but also make us laugh and think about life. Prepare for a trip down a more shadowy memory lane and also to have a lot of fun! Hugely recommended!