jo-carey

[jo-carey]

How to Sell an Unreliable Character

[Spoilers for How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix]

While How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix was an engaging and compelling novel that explored complex family dynamics, the point of view used to tell the story threw me a loop and kept me thinking about it even after I had finished the novel. How to Sell a Haunted House follows Louise Joyner, a single mother who has to fly back home to Charleston after her parents are killed in an accident. When she finds her childhood inhabited by the puppets her mother left behind, tensions arise between her and her estranged brother, Mark.

Hendrix uses close third and follows Louise throughout her stay in Charleston as she experiences her mother’s puppets acting ‘out of the ordinary’ and moving on their own. I found issues with the narrator following Louise instead of Mark due to her coming across as an unreliable narrator or simply a poorly constructed character. 

In the novel, we discover that when Louise was younger, she had an attachment to one of the puppets, Pupkin, who turns out to be the ringleader of the haunting of the Joyner house. She recounts her experiences with Pupkin: him biting her in the night, threatening her and her other stuffed animals, and convincing Louise to torture and almost kill Mark when they were younger. She buries Pupkin in the yard during her childhood and acts shocked when she sees him again, and he tries to kill her. For countless pages, Louise denies Pupkin’s animation and blames his movement and other puppets’ movement in the house on Mark, trying to scare her. Yet, Louise knows Pupkin is alive and possesses the wearer; why does she try to fool the reader into thinking he’s not? 

Louise is a challenging main character to connect with. Whether intentional or not, she lies a lot to the reader, explaining she needs the money from her parent’s inheritance to afford a house with a yard for her daughter, Poppy, so she can buy her a dog. Yet, she slips and tells us she would never buy a dog. She tries to convince the reader that she deserves the money from the house more than Mark by giving superficial reasons that even she doesn’t believe in.

Later in the novel, Pupkin attaches himself to Mark and attacks Louise by using Mark as a vehicle to hurt her. Trying to save Mark from Pupkin, she takes a power saw and slices his arm off. When Mark is furious with her and extremely depressed over the loss of his limb, a completely understandable reaction, of course, Louise acts hurt and bewildered that he would be upset with her. Louise is a character we are meant to follow closely and trust, but from the beginning to the end, she lies and acts out of the ordinary too much to fall under the guise of grieving the death of her parents.

Mark is a straightforward character who gets one chapter told from his point of view. Said chapter is easy to follow and wildly engaging. He is honest to himself, Louise, and the reader as he recounts his past and current experiences with Pupkin, rendering him a much more reliable character to follow throughout the story.

Despite Mark being a morally-gray character that the reader isn’t sure whether to love or hate, I believe he was the obvious choice to tell the story through because he doesn’t leave the reader questioning whether or not we can trust what we are being told. While we can cut Louise some slack for bits of unreliability due partly to grief, it is much harder to live in the novel and accept so much of its believability because of the countless times we catch Louise in a lie. 

Grady Hendrix crafted a novel that left me awake at night, staring down my squish mallows and stuffed animals on the off chance I could catch movement from them, which speaks volumes of his skill to deliver a horror trope that has been seen before. While I believe Mark would’ve served as a better character to follow through the novel closely, I appreciate so many things taking place in this story.

#KState #ENGL771 #How to Sell a Haunted House #Grady Hendrix

[jo-carey]

The Anatomy of Advertisement for a Love Story

Anatomy: A Love Story, by Dana Schwartz, follows the story of Hazel Sinnett, a wealthy young woman in the 1800s who is determined to become a physician. In a society where women are thought of as less than men and believed to be unqualified to become a surgeon, Hazel works in tandem with a resurrection man, Jack Currer, in order to study for the physician’s exam. Hazel finds herself torn between true love and a comfortable future along with the looming threat of the Roman Fever that has broken out in Edinburgh. This story explores ideas surrounding duty, passion, honor, and following your dreams in the face of evil and creates an exciting narrative for the reader to reflect on as they read. 

Anatomy: A Love Story was published by St. Martin’s Publishing Press, yet was hardly featured on the official Twitter for St. Martin’s and did not have a single post on their Instagram. However, Wednesday Books, the imprint for St. Martin’s, pulled their weight in the advertisement of Dana Schwartz’s novel. Numerous posts with extended captions encouraged social media users to run, not walk, to the nearest Barnes & Noble, to pick up this new novel. The book was also selected as the Winter 2022 YA pick for Reese Witherspoon’s book club, which has brought a lot of attention to the novel. Author, Dana Schwartz, has done a lot of self-advertising for the novel and posts updates and artsy photos of the novel. On Twitter, Schwartz retweets and responds to readers’ tweets about Anatomy: A Love Story, which not only strengthens the reader-author relationship but also helps spread the word about the novel.  

Schwartz’s novel has received a lot of hype which has led to relatively instantaneous success. The novel became an instant #1 New York Times Bestseller,  #1 Indie Bestseller, and #1 USA Today Bestseller. One of the most exciting advertisements that I saw while exploring social media posts about Anatomy: A Love Story was from Reese’s Book Club’s official Instagram. The cover of this novel is exceptionally eye-catching, and the reader can find themselves staring at it for long periods of time because the design is so unique and beautiful. Reese Witherspoon posted an inside look video about how the cover was designed and showed the different concepts that had been made and developed over time. I thought that this was such a unique way to get readers interested in a novel and in the design process. Many popular journals and magazine articles have been published over the past couple of months, with interviews with Dana Schwartz. The author has been putting in the work by interacting with the readers and making sure that the novel gets seen, and it is evident that it has paid off through its major success. 

A plethora of reviews are already available on the internet as this book has taken off in popularity, and many readers have been eager to get their thoughts about it out on the internet. With already almost 10,000 ratings and nearly 2,000 reviews on Goodreads, the novel has done relatively well in the eyes of readers. Many book critics and reviewers have also published their thoughts on various blogs and websites, leaving overall good reviews with sprinkled criticism. The top review on Goodreads for Anatomy: A Love Story was actually from Schwartz saying, “Look, I wrote this book so I'm a little biased. But personally, I think it's great.” Schwartz’s engagement and personability, I believe, were vital in the novel’s immense success. 

I would have liked to see some more advertising from the book’s official publisher. There were three tweets that I could find, and they were all responses to posts about the book and no official announcements or advertising efforts on social media on their end. While the parent company Macmillan is a well-known and popular publishing house, I would still have liked to see more of a connection between the author and the organization. Granted, the company has a multitude of books to advertise and publish. Still, I think that dedicating more than three tweets to Schwartz’s novel would present more of a team effort and really show their dedication to ensuring that the book was successful. While working on the social media team for a smaller publishing company, I have gotten to see firsthand the commitment and work required to advertise a novel successfully.  

Despite Schwartz’s monumental success due to a brilliantly creative novel and personal advertising efforts, the marketing from the official publication organization fell short in their efforts. A more cohesive and joint effort to work alongside Schwartz to market the novel would have provided a lot more of a supportive and engaging look for the company as well as relieved most likely a large amount of stress from the author in the marketing field. Props to Schwartz!

#dana schwartz #anatomy: a love story #kstate #engl767