See the cover of Amber Sparks’ ‘Happy People Don’t Live Here’ (exclusively)

The amber is squeaky“The long-awaited debut novel is almost here:” A story about secrets and buried trauma and little goth children. ”

Writer-mest known for his stories, essays and non-fiction-will be released Happy people don’t live here This fall, and people can reveal their protection exclusively.

Billed as a “dark funny Gothic story perfect for Halloween”, it will release right in the scary season. The novel follows “an independent mother and her Saturne daughter as they move into a haunted apartment building filled with eccentric neighboring-inclusive a professional mermaid and a handy-man-medium-only to stumble over a dead body in the dumpster,” teasing an official synopsis.

But when sparks are encouraged to describe the events in Happy people don’t live hereShe has a hard time boiling it down, she says exclusively.

“When people ask me the deceptive simple question” What are you about? “I have so many answers, I’m never sure what to offer, she says before she quotes some of the authors – and a particularly snappy filmmaker – who inspired the upcoming novel.

“Happy people don’t live here“She tells people,” is a Gothic mystery, filled full of strange side characters and incompetent discovery, because I love Thomas Pynchon and Barbara Comyns and Wes Anderson And Ellen Raskin, but it is also a story about secrets and buried trauma, and little goth -children, because I also love Shirley Jackson and because my own daughter is a bit Merricat and a little turtle Wexler. ”

“And because during the pandemic, when I wrote this book, I read lots of mystery novels – especially Dorothy Sayers – and thought it would be comforting to write one of my own,” she says. But she admits, “Writing a novel was, in fact, comforting.”

In its core, however, “however”Happy people don’t live here Is a book about mothers and daughters, says Sparks. And the author, a mother herself, wrote it for a period when she struggled with her sudden death.

“I had all these complicated feelings, thought of my relationship with my mother and my own young daughter and curated double functions for myself as (Andrei) Tarkovsky’s Mirror and Frozen 2 (and crying in a way that people really shouldn’t cry on Frozen 2Or, frankly, Tarkovsky) and so even if it is not about mothers and daughters, they are very much at the book. ”

“My therapist told me,” maybe you should write about your mom “, and I was like” I think everything I write is about my mom now, “and that’s probably true,” she adds.

Happy people don’t live here Is about mothers, and it’s about death, but it also has some humor because she says: “Life is very fun and death is also surprisingly fun, sometimes a sad way and sometimes just in a fun way.”

“Really,” says Sparks to People, the novel, “is just a journey through my Winchester House brain and its many crazy rooms: tuberculosis and miniatures and ghosts and medieval history and professional mermaids and taxidermi and gothic prisoners and ghosts, always ghosts, always ghosts.”

“In my writing there is a ghost in everything, because IRL is a ghost in everything,” she adds. “Although the ghost is just me, haunt myself and my fiction forever.”

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Happy people don’t live here Is out October 13 and is available for pre -order now, wherever books are sold.