Literal and Figurative Ghosts: Review of Micaiah Johnson’s The Unhaunting

Sullivan Summer Under Review:The Unhaunting. Micaiah Johnson. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, September 2026. “This novel is both allegorical and deeply personal,” Micaiah Johnson tells us in the letter to readers that begins her latest novel, The Unhaunting. Personal like a Rorschach test, similar to that invoked by the book’s blood-red cover, with its black-and-white image of a plantation home mirroring an open-mouthed profile, screaming in silhouette. But maybe that’s just what I see. For the promise of home as horror with hints of antebellum allegory is what drew me to the book. My own childhood home was an eighteenth-century New England Colonial, and I was raised by white, adoptive parents. I know a little something about the hauntings of houses and of Black girls. The lone Black girl—woman, really—in Johnson’s house is Shantell, tough, smart, and haunted by the deaths of her parents. With little to hold her to her northern existence, she accompanies her white best friend Avery back to the…

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