Happy People Don't Live Here
A Novel
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
In this darkly funny gothic tale, a reclusive mother and her saturnine daughter move into a haunted building brimming with eccentrics—and secrets.
Just past the edge of summer, Alice and her daughter, Fern, arrive at the Pine Lake Apartments—a former sanatorium occupied by an ensemble of peculiar neighbors and a smattering of ghosts. Among the living: the Mermaid Lady, who performs in a nightclub fish tank; the building’s handyperson, moonlighting as a medium; and an awkwardly charming professor of medieval studies. Fern alone is acquainted with the undead, who pass like troubled clouds through the apartments, humanity mostly lost ages ago. For the determinedly private Alice, Pine Lake seems the perfect place at the edge of the world to hide herself and her daughter—until the day Fern finds a dead body in the dumpster.
Intent on solving the mystery of this discarded corpse, Fern eagerly puts her encyclopedic knowledge of detective novels to good use while dodging warnings from her increasingly paranoid mother. She soon comes to realize that within the strange tapestry of Pine Lake residents, nothing is ever quite as it seems. Her investigation digs up long-buried secrets, including her mother’s, that implicate each of her neighbors . . . and conjures a new one from beyond the grave.
The hotly anticipated debut novel from “master of the fantastic” (Roxane Gay) Amber Sparks, Happy People Don’t Live Here is an unforgettable portrait of family—whether by birth or by chance or by choice—and the sometimes dangerous myths we make to keep ours together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Sparks's playful debut novel (after the collection And I Do Not Forgive You), a nomadic mother and daughter find solace among the oddball neighbors and ghosts of their new apartment complex, which was formerly a sanatorium. Alice, who "had always made art and had never considered herself an artist," earns a tenuous living from commissions for her miniature houses. She's fiercely protective of her precocious 10-year-old daughter, Fern, and grows worried when Fern insists she saw a dead body in the dumpster outside their building in exurban Minnesota, and that she can sense ghosts all around her. The plot thickens when one of those ghosts manifests as a talkative young con artist from the 1920s. As Fern seeks answers about the dead body, she and Alice make friends with their quirky neighbors, including their building manager who's skilled in taxidermy, a woman who dresses as a mermaid, a prize-winning novelist, and a kindhearted history professor. The zaniness can sometimes feel forced, and a few of the novel's many threads are left dangling at the end, but beneath the spunky girl detective plot is a finely crafted novel about fraught relationships, both between a mother and daughter and between the living and the dead. It's a cozy supernatural delight.
