HAUNT SWEET HOME is a quick haunting novella by Sarah Pinsker just in time for the Halloween season. With a ghost reality show backdrop, this story is sure to delight fans who will enjoy a backstage peek at the production process of these programs.
Mara is a little lost in her life aspirations. Working sporadically at a brewery and taking miscellaneous community college classes has found her at a place of underemployment and family outcast. When Mara’s cousin, Jeremy, offers her a job on the home renovation/haunting reality show that he hosts, she accepts. Mara soon learns she’s on the night crew, and her job entails using fog machines, hiding in the woods, making unusual sounds, and anything else to unnerve the new owners. When an extra production assistant named Jo arrives on set to help Mara, things get even stranger. Who is Jo, and why does she keep criticizing Mara’s life choices? As the manufactured hauntings continue, Mara soon realizes she may actually have her own supernatural ghost as well.
HAUNT SWEET HOME is a quick spooky read that has a great premise. The reality show production details are interesting, and Mara is a character that draws you in with her mixture of self-doubt and aimless living adaptability. She can be annoying, but she puts in a full effort on her new job and, in the process, finds some answers for herself. Quick, fun, and a little quirky, HAUNT SWEET HOME starts strong in the beginning but ends with a strange foray into carvings and introspection that leaves this reader a little confused about its intention.
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.
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