It’s Not the House: 8 Great Books with Unusual Hauntings

The call is coming from inside the house! Except this time the call is a ghost, and the house is Jessamyn Teoh. When Jess, broke and jobless, moves back to Malaysia with her parents, she thought her biggest problem would be telling them she’s queer. But that was before the ghost of her dead grandmother, a spirit medium, took up residence in her head. And Ah Ma is going to use Jess to settle the score with a gangster who has offended the Black Water Sister deity, with or without Jess’s permission.

This is my favorite book of 2022! And part of the reason I love it so much is because of the narrators. This is the story of a young woman with healing hands who moves back to her small NH town to help her dying father. There are also plots involving the ghost of a real NH naturalist, a gated forest, an expensive mail-order fox, a middle grade class, a missing former best friend, and even more. And bringing all of this to us are the narrators, the dead who reside in the town cemetery. They are funny and sweet, and I loved the rules about who gets to walk the town and who must reside in the ground.

And this is a slight book, but one that has stayed with me since I read it. Everything is different for Frances when she and her husband move to a new city in Australia. As she takes her dog on daily walks, she observes her eccentric neighbor who wears an old-fashioned dress in a garden that doesn’t quite seem to be there…

This is my second-favorite Amy Tan novel, after The Bone Setter’s Daughter — which everyone should read — but it has the best title. Bibi Chen had planned a spectacular trip from San Francisco to the Burma Road for 11 of her friends. But when she dies, she instead gets to experience the trip as a ghost and watch as her friends veer from her meticulous itinerary and eventually disappear on a foggy lake on Christmas morning.

And this is exactly as advertised: 100 stories about ghosts! Brockmeier has documented hauntings of so many kinds, both literal and metaphorical, in so many different ways! It’s a speculative delight. I also HIGHLY recommend his novel The Brief History of the Dead. It’s about a limbo city populated by dead people that are still remembered by the living, and what that city looks like when there’s only one person left on the planet.

If you work or have worked in retail, this novel will sound like a horror story! Erdrich takes events such as the beginning of COVID-19 and the police killing of a Black man, and incorporates them into a year in the life of Tookie. Tookie, who was recently released from years of incarceration, now works at an indie bookstore, where one day the ghost of her most annoying customer begins to haunt the store. Tookie must try and figure out why Flora won’t leave while the world is in turmoil just outside the doors.

And this fantastic brand-new novel from Han, who was just named one of the National Book Foundations 5 Under 35 for the year, is also about family ghosts. The Chos, a Korean American family living in Hawai’i, think they are living the dream with their successful delicatessen and their daughter in college. But when a viral video shows their son, who is in South Korea to teach English, attempting to cross into North Korea, it throws their world into turmoil. What they and the rest of the world don’t know, though, is that Jacob has been possessed by the ghost of his long-lost grandfather who wants to return to North Korea and find out what happened to his loved ones.

And last, but not least, another fabulous ghost with an agenda tale! But this time, the ghost is a young girl who can walk in the human world. Not only that, she’s the ghost of a girl named Okiku who was murdered centuries ago, but now roams the world killing those who kill. One day when she meets a misunderstood boy who carries evil under his skin that only she can see, she knows she must help him.