• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2022 November #2
  *Starred Review* Louise, a single mother, lives in California with her five-year-old daughter, Poppy. She has spent her life trying to keep physical and emotional distance from her family in South Carolina, especially her overly indulged brother, Mark. But when her parents die suddenly, Louise is forced to return home and reckon with the secrets that have been haunting her family for generations—secrets that may be actively trying to kill them. Organized into sections that refer to the stages of grief, the story follows Louise as she cleans out her parents' home, assessing hundreds of puppets and dolls that were her mom's life's work. The attic entrance is boarded up, the dolls appear to move on their own, and Pupkin, the unsettling clown puppet that was her mother's favorite, seems to be at the center of it all. Closure will take more than Mark and Louise getting along; it will require them to truly understand one another before they can have any hope of making it through this ordeal alive. With strong connections to twenty-first century classics such as Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts (2015) and Joe Hill's Locke and Key (2009), Hendrix' book sets the high watermark for horror in 2023. Copyright 2022 Booklist Reviews.

Grady Hendrix is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. He is the author of Horrorsto¨r, My Best Friend’s Exorcism (which is being adapted into a feature film by Amazon Studios), We Sold Our Souls, and the New York Times bestseller The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (currently being adapted into a TV series). Grady also authored the Bram Stoker Award–winning nonfiction book Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom of the seventies and eighties, and his latest non-fiction book is These Fists Break Bricks: How Kung Fu Movies Swept America and Changed the World.