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The Unhaunting

Pages
288
Published
2026
Language
English

Synopsis

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.\
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At the end of the Civil War, a daughter of the confederacy made what she thought was an innocent 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.\
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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.\
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But not only is the house in better shape than they’d expected, it makes them better 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.\
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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 a house that desperately wants to be.

About the author

M
Micaiah Johnson

Micaiah Johnson is a writer of speculative fiction, best known for her debut The Space Between Worlds, which explores parallel universes and identity. She is also the author of Those Beyond the Wall.