The Unhaunting

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

"You've never seen a haunted house like this one before." --Kylie Lee Baker, USA Today bestselling author of Japanese Gothic

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, tells her he has inherited 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; and Tobias, Avery's older brother and the contractor for the job, even quits 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 ever 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.

Author: Micaiah Johnson
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
Published: 09/29/2026
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.40w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9798217181131


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/20/2026
Booklist 08/06/2026

About the Author
Micaiah Johnson is a Carl Brandon Parallax 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 the 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 named a Best Book of 2024 by NPR, Reactor, Esquire and LitHub. She received her BA in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside, her MFA in fiction from Rutgers University-Camden, and her PhD from Vanderbilt University.