Book Review: "Homemade Haunting" by Rob Stennett

Summary from BN.com: Charlie Walker doesn't believe in God or the supernatural. But Charlie's views change when he takes the biggest risk of his life—he quits his job to write the novel he's always wanted to write.

The problem is that Charlie is a method writer. Since he's writing horror, he needs to experience horror. Charlie begins to dabble with the supernatural and experiences the paranormal around his house. Messages appear on mirrors, furniture moves, and his kids start seeing things.

Charlie is so lost in his book that he can't see how it's affecting his family. He thinks if he just stops, it will all wash away. It doesn't. Friends convince Charlie that his only choice is to find God to save his family and home.

Charlie becomes the unlikely hero in a supernatural battle. As he fights for his home and family, he meets his guardian angel and the demon assigned to him. Is Charlie going crazy? Is there really a supernatural war taking place around Charlie's home, the neighborhood mailbox, and local swimming pool?

Ok this isn't your average Christian fiction book. It involves demons, ghosts, and Ouija boards. It's about spiritual warfare but it's done in a very tongue in cheek sorta way. Most Christian books just talk about living out your faith but don't really go into detail about when you really need to use it. This book actually shows that there are times when you need to actually practice what you preach and just saying the "right things" isn't always going to cut it.
The main character, Charlie, is an author who is trying to write a horror novel but feels that in order to write it correctly he has to experience things. So it all starts off with learning about the game "light as a feather, stiff as a board" then escalates to the Ouija board before the real demons start arriving. He begins to back off from all this but finds out that his wife, who he had initially roped into joining him, has become fully enveloped in the supernatural.

What I think works best for this book is the combination of spiritual warfare with humor. Stennett is a VERY funny writer and mixed in with the normally serious topic is footnotes where Charlie explains things to the reader or adds in his two bits. While the main story in itself has lots of funny moments, I really found the footnotes to be hilarious at times. The whole Bloody Mary sequence was a hoot because I've been to many a sleepover where we tried doing it and ended up scaring ourselves silly and unable to go to sleep.

This was a really great read and one that I have been recommending to other readers. It's done extremely well and actually is really quite scary. This is the type of speculative fiction that I enjoy reading. It shows how easy it is to slip into the "dark side" without even really knowing it. All it takes is the first step to enter worlds unknown. Pretty much the moral of the story is don't mess with things that you don't really know about. While I haven't read the rest of Stennett's books, I do own them so they will be making it up the ranks on my TBR pile soon. I really enjoy his style of writing in this book and I'm looking forward to enjoying more of it in the future.

Homemade Haunting by Rob Stennett is published by Zondervan (2011)

This ARC was provided by a publicist

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