There is only one thing worse than a house that’s haunted: a house that desperately wants to be. Gothic while haunting the liminal space between a haunted house and haunted people.

I read an eARC of this book on NetGalley so thank you to the author and the publisher. I really enjoyed this author’s sci-fi books and I’m delighted to see they can do horror just as well.

I really enjoyed this, I found it absolutely gripping and I highly recommend it! But it is going to be hard to review because I so badly want to avoid spoilers, yet I want to talk about so much in the book!

This is a haunted house book. That’s clear from early on. Our main character is asked by a close friend to travel to the south and help him fix up a house he has inherited. From early on, apparitions occur, strange things happen. The characters are broadly quite accepting of this. What’s clever is the why behind the hauntings. This isn’t jump scares and revenge hauntings. There’s a far reaching and subtle reason for why the house is the way it is and it’s fascinating. There’s a real poignancy to this and it’s quite thought provoking with how it leaves you feeling about the house.

Main character is brilliant. She has a lot of trauma and it’s left her quite cynical. Which leaves her perfectly positioned to deal with what comes up. Far more than her friend who expects everything is going to be fine. Then we have the slightly more challenging character of the brother. There’s a complicated relationship with our main character and it changes throughout the book.

The atmosphere was great. There’s some very creepy moments in this book. I flew through this book as I was so engrossed!

“Everyone comes to a house dreaming of what they want to make it. No one ever thinks about what the house already is. No one cares what the house already wants.”

When Shantell’s best friend Avery invites her to live in Abernathy House, an inherited property in the American South, they move to build a real home for themselves. After enough tragedy for two lifetimes, horror-movie lover Shantell is cautiously optimistic. But when they arrive ready to renovate, the house is in better condition than expected. As strange happenings threaten to unravel Abernathy House’s eerie perfection, Shantell, Avery, and his brother Tobias uncover a darker history than they could have imagined.

As a haunted house lover, I found The Unhaunting to be a compellingly fresh take on the genre. There is another voice creeping behind Shantell’s third-person narrative, and it’s hungry. Johnson deftly encompasses neurodivergence, generational trauma, privilege, and race in America in this poetic novel, alongside lovable characters and genuinely frightening scenes. For readers who love a haunted house and unravelling a mystery, this book will keep you guessing.

An intriguing reversal of the haunted house narrative sees Shantell, Avery and Tobias fixing up the old family home.
This story is deliciously short but it takes you on an absolute whirlwind as you navigate the intricacies of what it wants.
If you're a reader who enjoys mystery, inverted horror concepts and a mystery that spanned literal generations, this could very well be the next book for you.
A wonderful read, highly entertaining and it definitely had my grimacing in a few areas. Thank you to Goodreads, Micaiah Johnson and Viking for the ARC!

If this book doesn’t get made into a limited series, I will be belligerently angry.

This is THE book you should be reading this autumn.

Have you seen that Coach ad with one of the Fanning sisters, where the narrator says something about the room changing to keep up with her? That’s what I kept being reminded of while reading Unhaunting. There’s something about this book that feels cinematic—strange, seductive, unsettling, and impossible to look away from.

Micaiah Johnson has created an enticing mélange of horror, history, desire, and power. At its heart is a brutal examination of the divide between rich and poor, Black and white, and what happens when someone dares to reach a hand across that divide. But a hand stretched over the line doesn’t necessarily blur it. Sometimes, it only makes you more aware of where the boundary lies.

And then there’s the horror. Experience the horror of the Deep South. It’s atmospheric, visceral, and deeply unsettling in a way that gets under your skin.

My favourite quotes:

"Do you want to know what it's like? To be the sole focus of hands intent on unmaking you? In a word: Heaven"

"Hell is getting exactly what you want."

Riddled with anxiety and grief, Shantell relocates to the South to help her best friend Avery renovate a recently inherited family home.

But what if the house is haunted?

Worse, what if the house is doing the haunting?

The Unhaunting covers themes of anxiety, anger, grief, loss and the ongoing benefits of slavery to white people.

This is a fantastic twist on the traditional haunted house genre.