This novel by T. Kingfisher, a Southern Gothic incongruously set in a suburban tract house, features a theme of return and/or reunion to find unsettling or outright shocking changes, similarly to THE TWISTED ONES and WHAT MOVES THE DEAD. Also, A HOUSE WITH GOOD BONES shares with THE TWISTED ONES the motif of a malignant grandmother. “There was a vulture on the mailbox of my grandmother’s house.” How could any fan of dark fantasy resist an opening line such as that? Narrator Samantha (Sam) receives a message from her brother that their mother seems “off.” Since Sam has been temporarily furloughed from her job as an archaeoentomologist (a scientist who studies insects in archeological digs), she travels to North Carolina to check out the situation. Her mother owns the house where she and her two children spent an impoverished period during Sam’s childhood, living with the late grandmother, Gran Mae. Upon arrival, Sam finds the usual cheerfully eclectic, cluttered décor replaced by a “sterile” ambience more reminiscent of her grandmother’s taste. The walls have even been repainted off-white. Her mother acts nervous, as if she feels watched or overheard.
Sam sees the environment in terms of ecology in general and, of course, arthropods in particular. In the house’s monoculture rose garden, she immediately notices the absence of insects aside from ladybugs. This phenomenon and the flock of vultures roosting in a neighbor’s tree, however, constitute the least of the strangeness. For instance, a swarm of ladybugs invades Sam’s bedroom at night. We gradually learn about her childhood and her grandmother’s peculiarities, including strictness verging on abuse, while Sam unearths buried family secrets -- literally, in one case. It takes a while to reassure herself that her mother isn’t sinking into senility, but the alternative is almost worse. Sam discovers her great-grandfather, Gran Mae’s father, practiced dark magic. No wonder Gran Mae was obsessed with “nice and normal.” Furthermore, the “underground children” she warned her grandchildren about turn out to be real, not imaginary boogeymen. And the rose bushes are sentient.
For me the climax, when the house collapses into a sinkhole, besieged by the underground children, required some suspension of disbelief, but I enjoyed it anyway. Gran Mae’s sort-of return, on the other hand, struck me as believably, deeply disturbing. Sam’s witty narrative voice, the vulture lady and local benevolent “witch” Gail, and the friendly gardener Phil, who grounds the whole story in the mundane milieu of a “cookie-cutter” housing development, irresistibly draw the reader into the experience. Kingfisher has an enviable talent, through Sam’s chatty yet sometimes sardonic tone, to feed backstory to the reader with never a sense of info-dumping. Amid the mainly happy ending, Sam’s unease with the idea that she might have inherited her grandmother’s magic causes the supernatural danger to linger in the reader’s mind after the final page. In Kingfisher’s afterword, she mentions her own battles with roses and the fact that this is her second novel to portray rose bushes as evil, the first being her “Beauty and the Beast” retelling, BRYONY AND ROSES. The section headings (labeled “First Day,” “Second Day,” etc.) enhance the theme with a brief description of a different rose variety for each one. Between the insects and the roses, this novel, like many of Kingfisher's works, displays her characteristic fondness for odd, fascinating scientific facts.
Margaret L. Carter
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