Family Secrets, Evil Puppets, and the Ghosts We Inherit

The novel starts with Louise Joyner. She is a single mom and lives with her daughter, Poppy, out west. Everything seems to be going well in her life until she receives a call from her estranged brother, Mark. He informs her that their parents died suddenly in a car crash, and has been sitting on that information for several days. Upset, Louise leaves Poppy with her ex and flies out east to deal with her family estate.

However, when Louise gets to her parents’ house, she finds that a mover and cleaning company are already there ahead of her. They had been paid by her brother to clean, sort, and get rid of anything they didn’t deem personal. Louise becomes more upset when Mark arrives and informs her that he has a plan to cremate his parents and dump their remains in the ocean. He believes that his parents wouldn’t want a funeral. He also believes that there is bad energy in the house and doesn’t want to go inside.

Louise thinks that Mark is nuts about the funeral and the house. She fights with him about the funeral arrangement and how she wants them to go through the house together to see what they can save and what needs to be given away. However, Louise notices weird things in the house: the vent is ripped out, and the attic entrance is boarded up haphazardly. Her dad left his cane behind, and her mom left her purse behind, even though they never would leave the house without them.

Then there are the dolls and the many puppets her mom created. Louise tries to ignore them, but she feels like they are constantly watching her. It doesn’t help that they move from places that she has previously set them. Plus, the TV keeps coming on by itself. While the purse and cane being in the house are weird, Louise tries to convince herself that Mark is doing things with the TV and the puppets/dolls to scare her. Will Louise be able to get Mark to admit to being responsible for the weird happenings around the house, or will they discover that there is something more sinister afoot? Louise is determined to find out.

Can our emotions give objects life? The story hints at that in the first chapter when it talks about The Velveteen Rabbit. It talks about how toys can become real if they are loved by their owner enough. That is exactly what happens with the puppet Pupkin. Louise’s mother loved Pupkin because that was the last reminder of her little brother. She talks to him all the time and considers him her friend. All of that love caused Pupkin not only to come to life but also to want his own agency. When Louise’s mom passed Pupkin to her as a little girl, Louise was happy at first. However, Pupkin doesn’t like it when the attention is not on him. Pupkin hurt Louise’s toys, who are all too afraid to help Louise fight Pupkin. After that, Pupkin turns his attention to Mark. He hates that Mark is getting all the attention, so he had Louise play pranks on Mark. She thought that they were fun at first until they started hurting Mark. The constant need for attention caused Pupkin to become evil. It illustrates that objects can have positive or negative emotions attached to them, and it can’t be ignored.

There is a line in the book that gives you something to think about: “A puppet is a possession that possesses the possessor.” When Louise played with Pupkin, he would take control if she wouldn’t do things for him. He would also try to attach himself to her arm so she wouldn’t be able to let go. Mark also had similar issues with Pupkin. The radical puppet group was inspired when Mark brought Pupkin to one of their meetings. Mark and the group decided to make Pupkin masks. When they put the masks on, they slowly started to stop caring about themselves and giving Pupkin more control. It wasn’t until one day when Mark happened to take off the mask that he saw what Pupkin did while he had control over Mark: murder animals, possibly murder a mother and child, and trashed the place where he was staying.

To have the power to do what he wanted, Pupkin chipped away at Mark and Louise’s personalities. He did this through threats and intimidation. For Pupkin to run free, Louise and Mark had to lose their voice to give Pupkin control. They started becoming less of themselves until there was almost a shell left of them. Once they forced Pupkin off them, Louise and Mark were never the same again. Louise went into denial about everything that happened, and Mark lost his spark, which caused him not to handle life’s difficulties well.

The novel also explores the topic of generational trauma. Louise noticed that her family tended to push any unpleasant thing under the rug and never talk about it again. Louise finds out that her mom has a brother she doesn’t talk about. He drowned when he was five because Louise’s mom wasn’t watching him. Instead of the family dealing with the grief, Louise’s parents decided to never speak of their son again and not even hold him a funeral. They just buried him in the backyard.

This caused Louise’s mom to do the same thing with her children. She never talked about the negatives, even death. Whenever something bad happens, she switches to something else.

Mark does the same thing when he finally gets away from the Pupkin masks. He ran away from the horrors that happened and begged his mom to pick him up. His mother could tell something was wrong with Mark, but she avoided asking him. Instead, her main focus was getting Pupkin back after Mark let the radical group borrow him. He didn’t want to go back to the horror he left behind. However, his mother didn’t care. They went to pick up Pupkin, and neither Mark nor his mother addressed what happened ever again.

In Louise’s case, she learned avoidance from her mom. After the abuse she suffered at the hands of Pupkin, Louise ends up dissociated from reality. She forces herself to forget what Pupkin did to her and does her best to avoid the puppet at all costs. Even when she is stabbed in the eye by Pupkin, she doesn’t want to believe what is happening is real. She would rather believe she was having a mental breakdown instead of facing reality.

Louise realizes that by burying their traumas, it got passed on to her daughter. Poppy builds a new Pupkin, and it proceeds to take control of her. Louise realizes at that point, her family needs to confront their past demons if they are ever to move forward and save Poppy from the same cycle of denial.

Overall, I really liked the book. It teaches that attaching emotions to objects is not necessarily a good thing, and it can give the object more control over us than we like. We also learn that we can’t let the troubles of our family’s past dictate our future. Generational trauma doesn’t have to be inherited. You have the power to break the cycle so that it doesn’t continue in the generations after you. It is possible to heal from extreme trauma instead of allowing it to consume you. In the spirit of the book, I have the following question: Do you think it is okay to keep secrets in a family, or do they cause more harm than good?