Happy People Don't Live Here

A Novel

By: Amber Sparks

Narrated by: Erin deWard

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 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.

©2025 Amber Sparks (P)2025 Dreamscape Media

Very strange book

I really wanted to like this book but couldn’t. I couldn’t even finish it. The main characters are completely ridiculous and the story just dragged on with no point in sight. Maybe it got better, but I couldn’t stay with it.