T. Kingfisher's A HOUSE WITH GOOD BONES

I come to the work of Ursula Vernon, aka T. Kingfisher, in somewhat backwards fashion. I knew her first as the "Wombat Test Subject" on her husband Kevin Sonney's podcast, Productivity Alchemy, on which show I've fallen way behind because I've pretty much given up on productivity but still occasionally enjoy, mostly for the stories of the couple's pets and livestock and Vernon's description of her writing and illustrating processes. She is a woman of considerable gifts and a singular speaking voice and is beloved of most of the people whose opinions on books matter to me, so got filed as "an author I know I'll like and I've got to try sometime" but that guarantee of quality somehow perversely reduces the urgency of sampling an author's work. See also Leonora Carrington, on whom I slept for years. 

Anyway then Vernon, writing here as Kingfisher, wrote a southern gothic novel A House with Good Bones, in which the heroine is not only an entomologist but an archaeological entomologist. Zoinks!

So of course I knew there'd be tension between the habits of skepticism and demanding evidence that are so deeply ingrained in most fictional (if not always in actual) scientists and whatever supernatural forces were supplying the horror; I was not ready for Kingfisher's very successful attempt to import the elements of gothic horror into a story set in a tract house built in the 1990s.

Our heroine, Sam, has had to leave her latest excavation while some human remains found there are investigated, so she decides to go visit her mother,  Edie, still living in the house Sam grew up in with Edie, Sam's older brother, Brad and, for a while, Edie's viciously unpleasant grandmother, whom Sam always called Grand Mae. Mae originally owned the house and ruled it with an iron hand and a shedful of garden tools for maniacally tending her flawless rose garden, demanding of her progeny an adherence to the impossible standards of 1950s TV family perfection that no actual humans ever achieved. After Mae's death, Edie made the house a bit more interesting and comfortable, with brightly colored paint on the walls and actually interesting art that didn't depict things like Confederate weddings hanging from them. 

So imagine Sam's surprise when she discovers her grandmother's nasty taste again dominating the house, and the kind of detail only someone like Sam would notice: a complete lack of invertebrate life in the rose garden.

Oh, and a local vulture -- as in the actual bird, not an epithet for a nasty neighbor, though there's one of them, too -- hanging out on top of the mailbox. Often more than one. 

The family secrets that emerge are straight out of the Women with Great Hair Escaping Castles playbook but don't feel forced into this very contemporary story; Kingfisher developed just the right background to explain the creepiness without having to resort to badly relocated Native American burial grounds or any of that foma, and in Sam and Edie gave us a delightful mother and daughter dynamic to enjoy while their world disintegrates around them. Even more delightfully, one of the vultures, named Hermes by his hedge-witchy keeper Gail, an older woman who worked in wildlife rehabilitation while she was Mae's much-disliked hippie neighbor but now lives the retired life of an herbalist with her last patient. Gail is pretty excellent, too, but Hermes' bizarre charisma always steals her thunder even before he earns his weird halo. Rounding out the duo is hunky, handy Phil, the grandson of the nasty neighbor who works as Edie's handyman and while there might be some romantic sparks between him and Sam, Kingfisher adds these with a light hand that never allows them to distract us from the thorny peril her characters are in.

So I'd recommend A House with Good Bones to anyone, but perhaps especially to the fans of John Bellairs; A House with Good Bones felt very much like a Lewis Barnavelt book for grown-ups -- though conversely, there's no reason, apart from occasional swearing, why a precocious kid fan of Bellairs wouldn't enjoy the hell out of this book. I could have used more insects, though. But we all know I'm rarely satisfied in that department. I'm glad that I got what I did, though, while on this wild ride of a story. Go get it!