How to Sell a Haunted House

Grady Hendrix separates How to Sell a Haunted House into five sections: “Denial,” “Anger,” “Bargaining,” “Depression,” and “Acceptance.” The titles of these five sections correspond to the five stages of grieving that psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described in her famous work On Death and Dying, originally published in 1969. Kübler-Ross was considered a pioneer for her work and was named as one of Time’s “100 Most Important Thinkers” of the 20th century.

In her theory, she posited that, after the death of a loved one or when faced with an impending death, a person will move through five different stages of grief, ending with the acceptance of death. This theory has been widely accepted and utilized, although there is some criticism that there is no empirical evidence to support it. However, in How to Sell a Haunted House, Hendrix uses it as a way both to organize the text and to reinforce the deeper themes of the novel.

In the denial phase, a person refuses to accept the reality of the death, and in the novel, the reader sees Louise refuse to recognize the death of her parents at first. Further, she denies the reality of her supernatural experience, even in the face of her own senses and experience.