Our Thoughts Precisely: Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker

Title: Haunt Sweet Home

Series: n/a
Author: Sarah Pinsker
Source/Format: NetGalley; eARC
More Details: Paranormal; Novella
Publisher/Publication Date: TorDotCom; September 3, 2024

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Synopsis from Goodreads...

On the set of a kitschy reality TV show, staged scares transform into unnerving reality in this spooky ghost story from multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Sarah Pinsker.

“Don’t talk to day about what we do at night.”

When aimless twenty-something Mara lands a job as the night-shift production assistant on her cousin’s ghost hunting/home makeover reality TV show Haunt Sweet Home, she quickly determines her new role will require a healthy attitude toward duplicity. But as she hides fog machines in the woods and improvises scares to spook new homeowners, a series of unnerving incidents on set and a creepy new coworker force Mara to confront whether the person she's truly been deceiving and hiding from all along―is herself.

Eerie and empathetic, Haunt Sweet Home is a multifaceted, supernatural exploration of finding your own way into adulthood, and into yourself.

I’ve mentioned SurrealEstate on the blog before. Well, its second season had an episode that was essentially a parody (or recreation) of a ghost hunting show. It was comedic but also told a heartfelt story about the fictional show’s host, a parallel to the interpersonal arc of Luke Roman. The concept was simple: manufactured haunting on a niche show that inevitably encounter a scenario outside of their control. So I’m more than familiar with a setup like that, which was why I was looking forward to Sarah Pinsker’s latest, a novella called Haunt Sweet Home.

It’s no secret: I like house stories (or stories involving houses). It’s why a show like SurrealEstate was so appealing, and Haunt Sweet Home fell into that same category. It combined home renovation and supposedly haunted properties into the titular show, while also shaping up into a narrative of self-discovery for the story’s main character, Mara Billings.

Mara started things but never committed; she often thought of herself as the black sheep of her family and was uncertain of her future and struggled with building connections with others. So when she gets the opportunity to work for her cousin’s niche show as a production assistant for the night crew, she’s hopeful it’ll be the thing to stick. It wasn’t an easy job. However, half the fun of the story for the reader, was watching the scenarios unfold/ the show being filmed as well as how Mara would handle being so far outside of her element, with a secondary cast also navigating a cut throat environment. Mara was sympathetic but also at times abrasive. However, I liked the nuance of Pinsker’s characterization of Mara. She almost haunted the narrative, even when she wasn’t fulfilling the role of a ghost. So when the inevitable confrontation happens, the proverbial shoe drop, when she could no longer run from herself, the emotional payoff was just chef’s kiss.

In Haunt Sweet Home the houses were secondary while much of the page space was devoted to a great ghost story and an exceptional character exploration. I highly recommend this one!

About the author....

Sarah Pinsker is the author of over fifty works of short fiction, two novels, and one collection. Her work has won four Nebula Awards (Best Novel, A Song For A New Day; Best Novelette, "Our Lady of the Open Road," Best Novelette, "Two Truths And A Lie," Best Short Story, "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather,"), two Hugo Awards ("Two Truths And a Lie" and "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather"), the Philip K Dick Award, the Locus Award, the Eugie Foster Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and been nominated for numerous Nebula, Hugo, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. Her fiction has been published translated into almost a dozen languages and published in magazines including Asimov's, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Uncanny and in many anthologies and year's bests. Sarah's first collection, the Philip K Dick Award winning Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea: Stories, was published by Small Beer Press in March 2019, and her first novel, A Song For A New Day, was published by Penguin/Random House/Berkley in September 2019. Her latest book is We Are Satellites, published in May 2021. Her second collection, Lost Places, will be published by Small Beer Press in March 2023. She is also a singer/songwriter with four albums on various independent labels (the third with her rock band, the Stalking Horses). She lives in Baltimore, Maryland and can be found online at sarahpinsker.com and twitter.com/sarahpinsker.

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