A HOUSE UNSETTLED

A haunted house, family, girl.

Asha Walker is having a hard time. The 17-year-old’s father is in prison for alleged embezzlement from a youth sports center (though anti-Black racism is a more likely culprit), and her mom is moving the two of them back to her family home in small-town New Brunswick. Locals believe the house is haunted, and Asha slowly comes to agree with them as events escalate from seeing faces in the ceiling and feeling spooky presences to full-on possession and ghostly violence. A variety of themes swirl around the story like spirits: Asha’s relationship with her family, including her menacing stepfather; her own burgeoning queerness; her new friend’s coming-out process; and Asha’s Black and mixed-race presence in a town founded on racial exclusion and violence (her mother’s ancestors were White settlers who arrived a few centuries ago). The slow pace means the plot picks up very slowly, and the truly creepy moments are tempered by the caring natures of two of the ghosts. There are plenty of metaphors to be mulled over, though one—“This place is…haunted with whiteness”—is pulled out explicitly for readers, and many other moments are laid out in ways that unfortunately feel more like arguments the author makes to readers rather than richly realized characters organically coming to their own conclusions.

An atmospheric story let down by more telling than showing.