T. Kingfisher has proven to be one of the smarter, engaging, and creepy voices in fantasy and horror. Her tales are often on the shorter side, but the impact and weight of her stories is on more than equal footing with her peers whose stories take up a larger word/page count. In A House with Good Bones, Kingfisher slips into familiar ground for her: a woman returning to her childhood home in the American South. While this Southern Gothic/Horror vein has proven fertile ground for Kingfisher’s dark tales, she has been able to spin unique stories with this theme.
A haunting Southern Gothic from a bestselling master of suspense, A House With Good Bones explores the dark, twisted roots lurking just beneath the veneer of a perfect home and family.
“Mom seems off.”
Her brother’s words echo in Sam Montgomery’s ear as she turns onto the quiet North Carolina street where their mother lives alone.
She brushes the thought away as she climbs the front steps. Sam’s excited for this rare extended visit, and looking forward to nights with just the two of them, drinking boxed wine, watching murder mystery shows, and guessing who the killer is long before the characters figure it out.
But stepping inside, she quickly realizes home isn’t what it used to be. Gone is the warm, cluttered charm her mom is known for; now the walls are painted a sterile white. Her mom jumps at the smallest noises and looks over her shoulder even when she’s the only person in the room. And when Sam steps out back to clear her head, she finds a jar of teeth hidden beneath the magazine-worthy rose bushes, and vultures are circling the garden from above.
To find out what’s got her mom so frightened in her own home, Sam will go digging for the truth. But some secrets are better left buried.
Samantha (Sam) Montgomery is about to start a remote archaeoentomologic (a science that combines entomology [insects] and archaeology) dig when something is found at the site that puts a halt to the job, so she returns to home and spend some time with her mother Edith. What she discovers is that her mother has changed quite a bit, much thinner than Sam recalls and anxious. Edith references Sam’s deceased grandmother & Edith’s mother Mae. Mae passed away several years prior to the events of the novel, so Sam is confused by Edith’s behavior, she wonders if it is a delayed mourning or something darker.
The interior of the house is all but unrecognizable, rather than the bright colors Sam recalled, the walls are painted a dull gray with no character. A vulture hangs out at the mailbox, and is joined by another vulture as Sam’s time at her mom’s house continues. When Sam checks out the garden, she oddly discovers no insects in the soil. The insect issue becomes even more strange when Sam wakes up one day to discover her room has been swarmed with ladybugs. As a person who studies insects, Sam knows a thing or two about their behavior, so this is even more unsettling for her.
Kingfisher, in her horror/gothic novels, manages to pull off a folksy-creepy vibe. Added in is a nice twisted, snarky sense of humor. This all comes through the wonderful voice of our narrator Sam. Again, Kingfisher excels with these first-person tales of creepiness and dread, but each of her protagonists are wholly their own. As we learn more about Mae, Sam’s grandmother, the sense of creeping dread saturates the story even more. As Mae’s presence becomes more felt, Sam becomes more assertive and more protective of her mom, Edith. Kind of like a reverse mama-bear in how the child takes no crap to see that the welfare of her mother is not shaken. This parent-child relationship is completely on the opposite end of the spectrum of a similar relationship in the book I read just prior to this one (The Crimson Road by A.G. Slatter).
I also love some of the quirks Kingfisher throws into her novels, the setting of The Hollow Places being a roadside museum and here, how Edith’s friend and neighbor Gail has a pet vulture and how prominently vultures feature into the story. Further fleshing out the neighborhood (so to speak) of where Edith lives is a man named Phil, the handyman to whom Sam finds herself increasingly drawn.
That aforementioned creeping dread that increasingly saturates the story comes to a rather audacious and outrageous (in a wonderful fashion) climax. Where Kingfisher takes the story from there was fun even if it led to a slightly abrupt conclusion/resolution.
Kingfisher continues to impress me with each novel for many reasons: her characters, her dark sense of humor, the subtle and creeping dread of horror in her novels, and her ability to take one concept (adult returning to childhood home in some way) and fashion many unique and highly enjoyable novels.
Highly recommended
© 2025 Rob H. Bedford
Side Note: this is the second Kingfisher novel I’ve read this year. I’m an audible member and her Swordheart, a novel in her White Rat universe, was a freebie/discounted title so I gave it a spin. While Kingfisher’s humor was present, the story was quite different – essentially a fantasy/fairy-tale romance involving a young woman on the run from the family into which she married whose only true support may lay in a man trapped in a sword. Right, quirky, bizarre, and supremely enjoyable.
Published by Tor Nightfire | March 2023
Hardcover | 247 Pages
Excerpt: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250829795/ahousewithgoodbones/
Review copy purchased
