Tordotcom Publishing is thrilled to announce that Ellen Datlow has acquired a standalone novella from Hugo and Nebula Award award-winning author Sarah Pinsker titled Haunt Sweet Home, a paranormal ghost story in which staged scares transform into unnerving reality on the set of a kitschy reality TV show. Publication is scheduled for Fall 2024. The deal for World English rights was brokered by Kim-Mei Kirtland at Howard Morhaim Literary Agency.
Check out the gorgeous cover below!
“Don’t talk to day about what we do at night.”
When aimless twenty-something Mara lands a job as the night-shift production assistant on her cousin’s ghost hunting/home makeover reality TV show Haunt Sweet Home, she quickly determines her new role will require a healthy attitude toward duplicity. But as she hides fog machines in the woods and improvises scares to spook new homeowners, a series of unnerving incidents on set and a creepy new coworker force Mara to confront whether the person she’s truly been deceiving and hiding from all along—is herself.
Eerie and empathetic, Haunt Sweet Home is a multifaceted, supernatural exploration of finding your own way into adulthood, and into yourself.
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Haunt Sweet Home
In my novel We Are Satellites, a character is in the hospital watching a TV show that combines paranormal and home renovation. On the show they choose houses reputed to be haunted, and have the new owners repair the house by day and sleep there by night. It only has a couple of lines in the novel, but I was joking with a friend that I wanted to pitch the show to a reality show producer. He said “Why not just make it a book?” So I did!
I tossed it at a character who is still sorting out what she wants to do with her life, and how to live up to family expectations, all while dealing with her new bottom-rung job on the set of the reality show Haunt Sweet Home. I loved trying to figure out how to fake-haunt a house alongside Mara, and I hope readers like Mara and Haunt Sweet Home—the book and the show—as much as I do.
—Sarah Pinsker
I love Sarah Pinsker’s short fiction, and have been privileged to have worked with her on two of her stories for Tor.com. Her new novella about a woman hired as production assistant for a reality tv show that follows new tenants into supposedly haunted houses is a wonderful addition to her oeuvre. I’m eager for readers to join Mara as she learns as much about herself as about the haunting of houses.
—Ellen Datlow, Editor with Tordotcom Publishing
Sarah Pinsker is the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K Dick Award winning author of A Song For A New Day, We Are Satellites, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea, Lost Places, and over sixty works of short fiction. Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Uncanny, and in numerous anthologies and year’s bests. She is also a singer/songwriter with four albums on various independent labels. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland with her wife and two weird dogs. Find her online at sarahpinsker.com.
