“Pain is the only thing in this world you can become attached to without fear of losing it.”
This line from her novel, “The Unhaunting,” has, well, been haunting author Micaiah Johnson.
It “has been at the front of my brain since I wrote it,” Johnson said during a recent email interview.
The quote is one of many in “The Unhaunting” that stand out on the page, making the reader consider how it applies not just to the book, but to themselves and the world around them.
The novel follows a woman as she moves into a Civil War-era Mississippi house that her best friend has just inherited along with his brother. As the threesome works to restore the homestead, they grow almost too comfortable in the home despite all the ghosts it seems to hold.
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Breaking from traditional haunted house tropes, the manor itself is also a character. While a bit of a spoiler, it’s a twist that takes place almost immediately at the end of the opening scene.
“It happened almost without me realizing what I was typing,” Johnson said about the house having its own point of view. “But once that voice came through, everything else fell into place.”
Johnson’s latest — out Tuesday, Sept. 29, from G.P. Putnam’s Sons — is much more than just a Southern Gothic; it also speaks deeply about generational trauma and privilege. The author of the award-winning “The Space Between Worlds” has studied race and holds not just a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from the University of Riverside and a master’s degree in fiction from Rutgers University-Camden, but also a doctorate from Vanderbilt University.
“Everyone wants to feel special. That’s normal. For those who are comfortably in the dominant culture, the easiest way to feel special or stand out is to take up aspects of marginalized cultures,” she said. “The house is like wealthy people who want to adopt the trappings of poverty, but don’t want to suffer what the poor suffered to produce that culture.”
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Read on to learn more about the Southern California native now Brooklyn-based author’s first step into horror, where she draws inspiration from and what she’s working on next. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. First, can you tell us a little about “The Unhaunting” and how it came about?
“The Unhaunting” is a story of a house without ghosts, who will do anything to get them, and a girl with ghosts who thinks she would do anything to be safe. It’s about what you would do when the haunted house is also really, really nice to live in. Unconsciously, I think I was processing a lot of what it feels like to operate in academia and publishing, a place that might crave and resent your difference in equal measure.
Q. What made you decide to give the house its own point of view?
Toni Morrison once talked about feeling like the character in “Beloved” — a haunted house novel very close to my heart and this project — just walked out to greet her as she stood outside. The house came to me in a similarly spontaneous way.
Q. The house seems to hunger for the characters’ pain and the ghosts that haunt them. What does it mean to you when you write about those ghosts being stolen?
The house in the book likes the spectacle of ghosts, and wants to have it. But it doesn’t want grief or true suffering. Its desires are superficial. The house seeks a texture it thinks is being unfairly kept from it.
Q. Your first novel, “The Space Between Worlds,” and its sequel, “Those Beyond the Wall,” both lean sci-fi. What made you decide to move into horror with “The Unhaunting”?
Speculative fiction can use other worlds or different timelines to really excavate parts of our society that would be harder to explain without the fantastic. But for this story I found that distance frustrating. There are things I wanted to explore, and scenarios I wanted to work through with my readers, that required exactly this world’s history, and exactly this world’s problems, without the comforting distance of metaphor.
Q. You’ve spoken before about how coming from the High Desert helped inspire your first two novels. What made you pick Mississippi as the setting of “The Unhaunting”? How did the location help shape the story?
For my Ashtown series, the scarcity of the High Desert existing next to an abundant financial sector like Los Angeles was too delicious a setup to overlook. But there is a timelessness to it — like all of California — where the past always feels either superficial or eons deep. Living in the South and studying 19th Century America really solidified that as the location I wanted for this book. Something about the area gives you the feeling of ghosts on every patch of grass, hanging from every tree.
Q. Do you have any other projects you’re working on that you’d like to talk about? And will you be at any upcoming Southern California events?
Yes! While I’m sure I will be returning to horror soon, my next project is another speculative fiction in the Ashtown series. This tour doesn’t have any Southern California stops on the docket — yet. I generally go where I am sent, so here’s hoping an excuse to visit home comes up soon!
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