How to Sell a Haunted House

Grady Hendrix separates How to Sell a Haunted House into five sections: “Denial,” “Anger,” “Bargaining,” “Depression,” and “Acceptance.” The titles of these five sections correspond to the five stages of grieving that psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described in her famous work On Death and Dying, originally published in 1969. Kübler-Ross was considered a pioneer for her work and was named as one of Time’s “100 Most Important Thinkers” of the 20th century.

In her theory, she posited that, after the death of a loved one or when faced with an impending death, a person will move through five different stages of grief, ending with the acceptance of death. This theory has been widely accepted and utilized, although there is some criticism that there is no empirical evidence to support it. However, in How to Sell a Haunted House, Hendrix uses it as a way both to organize the text and to reinforce the deeper themes of the novel.

In the denial phase, a person refuses to accept the reality of the death, and in the novel, the reader sees Louise refuse to recognize the death of her parents at first. Further, she denies the reality of her supernatural experience, even in the face of her own senses and experience. From there, Louise moves into the anger stage, where the person is angry at the reality of death. That anger can be directed at oneself or at others, and Louise manifests this by taking out her anger on Mark every time she feels out of control or threatened by the reality of their parents’ death. This is the longest section of the novel, and correspondingly, it takes Louise the longest time to move through this stage. In the bargaining phase, someone who is dying, or attached to someone who is dying, attempts to make deals with God, or sometimes with other people, in order to change the situation. Louise and Mark attempt to bargain with Pupkin by deciding to leave the house alone and wait for the evil to dissipate before they make any decisions to change anything.

The depression phase comes when someone has accepted the death but still feels all of the emotions connected to that death. In the novel, the “Depression” section comes after the climactic supernatural scene. In the aftermath, Louise and Mark are deeply wounded and struggle to return to their former lives. They are not quite done grieving or dealing with Pupkin, but Louise accepts the reality of the situation and the new status of her family. The final stage, acceptance, denotes an emotional detachment from death, opening up the possibility of moving on. In the novel, this section only encompasses one chapter, which offers a conclusion to the supernatural events as well as closure for the family. Louise is able to cry, at last, for her parents’ deaths, and in the final scene, she, Mark, and Poppy return to the house, which now bears no trace of their childhood home. The scent of stollen, reminding them of their father, offers comfort and closure, and they are able to leave the house behind and fully move on. By utilizing this structure, Hendrix reinforces the idea that this novel is more than a horror story—it is a story about family, loss, and grief.