The Unhaunting - by Micaiah Johnson Hardcover

Book Synopsis

Award-winning author Micaiah Johnson invites you to Abernathy House.

A house, itself, is nothing. It's not a shelter until it is sheltering someone. A house is a housefire, waiting for its match. A house is a ghost story, waiting for its death.

At the end of the Civil War, a daughter of the confederacy made what she thought was an innocent wish: to build a house where nothing bad could happen. But peace came at a price, and one hundred and seventy years later Shantell and her friends are about to discover where all that darkness ended up.

When Shantell's best friend, Avery, inherits a house big enough to make their dreams of a sanctuary come true, she's too cautious to be optimistic. A lifetime of loss -- her father to the Iraq war, her brother to police violence, and her mother to suicide -- has taught her cynicism, and even though Avery swears the house has never experienced a tragedy, she goes along expecting everything from black mold to evil spirits.

But not only is the house in better shape than they'd expected, it makes them better too: Shantell's anxiety stops flaring up, terminally shallow Avery is suddenly capable of deeper emotions. Tobias, Avery's older brother and their contractor for the job, even stops chain smoking.

There's an eeriness to the calm, and it's almost a relief when they realize they do not walk alone in Abernathy House. If nothing bad has never happened here, where are all these ghosts coming from? As they dig into the house's history, Shantell, Avery, and Tobias discover that there's only one thing worse than a house that's haunted: a house that desperately wants to be.

About the Author

Micaiah Johnson is a Carl Brandon and Compton Crook Award-winning author. Her debut novel, The Space Between Worlds, was a Sunday Times Bestseller, a Locus Award finalist, an Editors' Choice at The New York Times and was named one of best books of 2020 and one of the best science fiction books of the last decade by NPR. Her follow-up novel, Those Beyond the Wall, a timely look at violence during apartheid, was released in March 2024 and has been named as a Best Books of 2024 by NPR, Reactor, Esquire and Lithub. She received her bachelor of arts in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside, and her master of fine arts in fiction from Rutgers-Camden, and her PhD from Vanderbilt University.