Louise Joyner

Louise Joyner is the protagonist of Grady Hendrix's horror novel How to Sell a Haunted House — a woman who returns to her childhood home in Charleston, South Carolina after her parents are killed in a car accident to handle the estate alongside her estranged brother Mark. The house, full of their mother's enormous puppet and doll collection, turns out to be genuinely haunted in ways that force Louise and Mark to confront both the supernatural and the family history they have both been avoiding.

Hendrix is one of contemporary horror's most distinctive voices, and How to Sell a Haunted House is among his most emotionally resonant works — the haunting is real, but it is also an externalization of family grief, unresolved resentment, and the specific horror of returning to your childhood home as an adult and finding it full of things you do not understand about your parents. The puppet collection is genuinely terrifying.

Louise's relationship with her brother, and with the mother they both have complicated feelings about, gives the horror stakes an emotional weight that pure supernatural fiction often lacks. Hendrix consistently grounds his horror in human psychology, and Louise's specific situation gives him exceptionally rich material to work with.

A standalone horror novel.