Haunt sweet home

Mara is seen as a family dropout, always quitting, never committing--unlike her cousin Jeremy, a once model who now hosts a home-renovation show focusing on houses that might be haunted. He hires her as the show's new night production assistant, which she soon learns involves a lot of setting up fog machines, recordings, and other fake scares to freak out each episode's new homeowners. It's silly, but it's well within her range of skills, and she finds she actually likes the gig, strange and exhausting though it might be. At least until things start going sideways at their latest job. Is someone else messing with her fake hauntings? Or has a real ghost entered stage right? This novella from Pinsker (Lost Places, 2023) is fun, eerie, and campy. Mara is a solid protagonist, people pleasing, constantly feeling invisible, and trying to make herself useful instead of ignored. The ultimate ghost story is unexpectedly beautiful. Fans of HGTV will be entertained by the twist on home-renovation classics, but most fantasy fans will enjoy this soft-horror tale of haunting that ultimately centers on a young girl just hoping to be appreciated for once.

Mara's life hasn't been going anywhere, and seeing her family during the holidays doesn't help, just before she goes back to college for the third time. Then her cousin Jeremy invites her to be a production assistant on his home-makeover/ghost-hunting reality TV show, but it turns out to not be quite what she expects. Her job is planting fog machines in orchards and creating scares to spook the show's homeowners. Then odd things begin to happen on set, and a new coworker, Jo, begins to insinuate herself into Mara's work and life enough for her to wonder if Jo is better than Mara--or just a better Mara. The novel's plot is supported by short vignettes of what happens on screen in the show, and the reality-TV machinations are a good foil for the underlying action between Mara and Jo. VERDICT Pinsker's (Lost Places) evocative prose turns an amusing reality-show backdrop into a haunting story of hiding from (and discovering) oneself.--Kristi Chadwick