Nicole recommends "The Unhaunting"

 

Wake up babe, new haunted house book for adults just dropped! Well, it dropped in September. The book is The Unhaunting by Micaiah Johnson.

 

When Shantell’s best friend Avery inherits a (post-war) plantation home, the two of them join Avery’s brother Tobias at the house for the summer to fix it up. There’s something weird about the house, from the occasional ghost sightings to the disappearing attic to the spooky warnings from the local townsfolk. Except the house isn’t haunted, it just wishes it was.

Like a runaway AI, the house in The Unhaunting isn’t evil because of what it is, but because the instructions that were built into its foundations were warped to begin with. Avery’s great-grandwhoever built the house to be a place where nothing bad can happen, and there are a lot of really wrong ways to interpret that instruction.

Obviously, the whole “not haunted but trying to be” plot is new, but what really sets this ghost story apart is the way the story interacts with privilege and blackness and generational grief. Anyone who enjoyed When the Reckoning Comes by LaTanya McQueen or Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark will want to pick this one up.