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.

Duuuuuuude!!! WHAT!?!

This was phenomenal! The Unhaunting is not your traditional haunted house story.
In fact, it’s not even a haunted house…the house is the haunting.

This was such a refreshing way of exploring generational pain and grief. Johnson have created such a unique and creepy story that weaves the real horrors of racialised inequalities, slavery and classism.

The characters feel so real, reacting and making decisions based on their own lived experiences. Sometimes I felt like I could see myself in Shantelle. The way she held her pain and grief.

An absolute must read!

How far would you go to protect your family from harm? Would you create a safe space for them? Could you live with yourself knowing the cost of that safety and prosperity? The Unhaunting is a slow (SLOW)-burn, but ended up being intense, unique and seriously one of the best haunted house stories I’ve ever read.

Johnson succeeds masterfully in exploring privilege, racism, generational trauma, mental health, and interpersonal relationships. This story will grab the reader with hooks through mundane scenarios and situations, where something just isn’t quite right, only to suddenly be confronted with gut-clenching disturbing events, and to return to normal - or so it may seem for a little while, until the next horror shows itself. I loved it. Absolutely loved it.

A big thanks to Penguin General and NetGalley for this ARC!

Thanks to Netgalley and Penguin UK for the early copy of this book.

I’ve read some really good books recently, but this one gave me that feeling I don’t get unless the book is REALLY good. That vibe that it’s going on without you and you have to rush back to it. Thoughts of the book keep coming back to you the whole time between reading, wondering what’s going to happen next.

So. Good.

At the heart of it I think this is a book of two hearts: one is of the house itself and its extreme need to experience everything it hasn’t been allowed to. One is the lived experience of POC people, now and back in the times of lyn**ing. How the privileged white people weren’t necessarily causing evil themselves, but in the ignorance they were perpetuating the systemic evil at best.

This book does a really good job of delving into that, making it accessible to people who maybe haven’t examined this side of things before, but not doing it in a patronising way.

The mind bending twisty nature of the story was very fun to read. Like being in the head of only unreliable narrators but ACTUALLY you’re inside the mind of the house itself.

It really makes the choice of living in your privilege meaning directly impacting others negatively such a sharp thing.

I absolutely loved it - so unique, so spooky, really makes you think.

I love this author and after two great books (the space between us and this) she’s really making a run for my auto-buy author list!

I absolutely loved The Unhaunting. This is such an interesting and unusual take on the haunted-house story, and I was hooked by the idea of Abernathy House from the beginning.

What I enjoyed most was how the supernatural elements are woven together with the history of the house and the people connected to it. There is a constant sense that something isn't quite right, even when everything appears calm on the surface.

The atmosphere was fantastic, and I really enjoyed the characters and the deeper themes running through the story.

If you enjoy Southern Gothic horror, haunted houses, dark history, and stories that make you think, I definitely recommend this one.

A memorable five-star read for me!

4,5/5 stars

A house, itself, is nothing. It's not a shelter until it is sheltering someone. Not a home until it is digesting a
family. It is an empty theoretical. A house is a house fire, waiting for its match. A house is a ghost story, waiting for its death.

When anxiety ridden Shantell gets the news that her best friend Avery have inherited a house, it's almost to good to be true. The safe haven they have always dreamt about. The work on renovating the house is far less extensive than they first thought.
And why does Shantell's anxiety stop flaring up, chronically shallow Avery is all of a sudden capable of deeper emotions and his brother Tobias stops smoking without even thinking about it. And how come no one remember the big wrap-around porch?

Nothing bad happens in the big house.

This is a delicious take on a haunted house tale. It's innovative and eerie. A great twist of the classic horror story in a way at least I haven't seen before (and I love a good haunted house). It is written in such a fantastic way, both prose wise and the building of the story.
I flew through the second half of the book, not able to put it down due to the twists and turns of the story.

4.5⭐️
When Shantell's best friend, Avery, inherits an old house in rural Mississippi, she agrees to move in and help fix it up. Dealing with severe anxiety and trauma, Shantell isn't overly optimistic but is surprised to find herself content for the first time in a long while. That's until ghosts start appearing and she starts to enquire about the houses history.

The Unhaunting is a quiet, atmospheric and eerie read. It's such an original and unique take on the haunted house trope - the writing is also so gorgeous and I found myself highlighting so many passages! I love how the house was used as an allegory for racial injustice, privilege and generational trauma.

Johnson also did a really great job at blending supernatural horror with real history and I really enjoyed seeing the references to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. This was definitely a slow burn, and you have to be patient for the pieces to fall into place, but it really pays off imo!! A must-read for southern gothic horror and haunted house lovers. I haven’t seen anyone else talking about this one yet so I hope it gets the hype it deserves!

Thanks so much to @netgalley, @PenguinUKBooks and @VikingBooksUK for the opportunity to read this arc!