Take reality TV ghosthunting, marry it with reality TV home makeover and then write a book about a Production Assistant (PA) working on said show and you get – Haunt Sweet Home! And if you are me, you get a book that started stressing me out even before we got to the creepier bits.
Mara is our lead character and she is sort of adrift. She’s an only child, the youngest cousin in a sprawling family of musicians (except she has no musical talent), with a grandmother who was a master woodworker (but who had arteritis set in before she could continue the family tradition of a carved chair around the family fire pit for Mara. And whose arthritis when it set in prevented her from really teaching Mara about woodworking herself). She can’t settle on what she wants to be, or do, and she is in and out of school and in a precarious financial state.
That adrift feeling, that feeling of being just a little out of lockstep with others in your family, I know it. And so I identified with Mara (although I feel like I am no longer drifting I remember when I did) and so yes, Mara was giving me the stress feelings.
It is one of Mara’s cousins who gets her the job on the TV show he hosts (Haunt Sweet Home) when she ends up leaving school again. The show follows couples who are renovating a property (which isn’t that scary enough? It is not even home renovation just home care, and a clogged sink recently had me ready to call it quits with my place) when the property just so happens to be haunted (no lie: I would watch this show if it was “real” in any sense in a heartbeat). Mara is hired to be a PA, but a PA with the night shift, the part of the crew whose job it is to help the haunting along. Reality TV in this book is about as real as the “reality” TV I watch.
I enjoyed the behind-the-scenes of the fictional show, and how the ghosts were made to “haunt”, The book then slowly ramps up the weird/uncomfortable, and then – plays out in what I found to be a very satisfying way. Maybe a tad predictable in parts, but it was still a fun ride!
This book is very light on the actual chain-rattling ghosts kind of creepy. It’s got a lot of how things are possibly made to happen on ghost-hunting TV shows, and as a person who loves any kind of behind-the-scenes things, well I enjoyed that part a lot. Did I want more you know – supernatural? Yeah, of course, but that is because that is what my brain craves. It’s a more personal story of a young woman adrift, and the kind of weird spot in her life she’s found herself in than it is about ghosts.
I think I liked this as much as I did because of how uncomfortably much I related to the protagonist. I saw a version of me in her that I’ve mostly moved past, and at times I wanted to reach into the book and be like “Be more assertive, it will help!”
I came for the conceit of “Reality TV show and ghosts” and stayed for the protagonist who reminded me of myself.