Old houses always have buried secrets. An archeological entomologist is perhaps extra qualified to dig those up—and she’ll need to if she wants to get to the bottom of her mom’s strange behavior in A House with Good Bones, a delightful Southern Gothic by T. Kingfisher which came out back in March. In a fun coincidence, the audiobook for this one is narrated by Mary Robinette Kowal, author of the book I reviewed last week, The Spare Man.
When work on her archeological dig is temporarily stalled, Sam Montgomery decides to wait out the delay by staying with her mother, who now lives in what Sam can’t help but still think of as her grandmother’s house in suburban North Carolina. Immediately, something seems off about both her mother and the house. Ordinarily outspoken and vivacious, Sam’s mother now seems timid and anxious, particularly when the topic of her own departed mother comes up. She has repainted the walls the boring beige of her childhood and restored Gran Mae’s cringingly Confederate artwork to the prime spot above the mantle. Meanwhile, Gran Mae’s treasured rose bushes seem to be thriving despite no one tending to them. And most alarming of all (to an entomologist, at least), the garden is completely devoid of insect life. Sam’s nerves are tested further by the ominously watchful vultures that come from their witchy neighbor’s yard to post a guard by their front door. Sam doesn’t know which is more troubling—the thought that her mother might be going crazy, or that she might be reacting rationally to something even stranger going on in the house.
As a horror novel, A House with Good Bones does an incredible job of recontextualizing benign or even beautiful things into something terrifying. Roses are a central motif in this story, and each chapter is headed with a description of one of the thirteen species of rose that Gran Mae grew in her meticulously cultivated garden. An old woman obsessively tending a batch of roses that live on after her death seems like a sweet image, but as my earlier posts on Flowers in Gothic Literature and Pernicious Plants in Horror Fiction show, there’s a long literary tradition of ominous or outright dangerous flowers. The other unexpected bit of horror imagery in this book consists of ladybugs. Even those of us who reel back in horror from most creepy crawlies usually make an exception for these beneficial visitors to our gardens. But any creature, no matter how cute and colorful, can become terrifying when swarming masses start showing up in places they shouldn’t. Yet even as this book shows roses and ladybugs in a new terrifying light it does the opposite for a creature often considered ugly and ill-omened: vultures. If you’ve never thought of vultures as cute before, just wait until you meet Hermes, an injured rescue turned devoted companion of their neighbor Gail.
Even creepier than the roses and ladybugs, though, are the boogeymen used to terrify the children of the Montgomery family. Growing up, both Sam and her mother, Edie, were chastised by Gran Mae that the “underground children” would come and get them if they were bad. As adults, Sam and Edie laugh off this idiosyncratic bit of family lore, but the underground children turn out to be all too real. I can’t say much more than that without spoilers, except to say that these underground children and the related plotline puts this book as much in the realm of weird fiction and cosmic horror as Southern Gothic.
Whether you, like me, can’t get enough of T. Kingfisher’s writing or you’ve never encountered her before, I highly recommend picking this one up. You can find A House with Good Bones on shelves now at your favorite local retailer, or order it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve read it, let me know what you think in the comments below!