Novel: The Haunting

Overview
Margaret Mahy's The Haunting (1982) is an atmospheric young adult novel that blends psychological insight with supernatural suspense. The story centers on Barney Palmer, a sensitive boy whose ordinary life is shaken by uncanny memories and eerie happenings that reach back into the seventeenth century. The novel weaves a coming-of-age tale with a historical ghost story, exploring how the past can intrude on and shape the present.
Mahy balances dread and tenderness, creating a sustained, quietly unsettling mood while keeping the emotional stakes personal. The narrative treats its supernatural elements with seriousness rather than spectacle, making the haunting feel like an unfolding of identity as much as a battle with external forces.

Plot
Barney begins to experience visions and sensations that do not seem entirely his own. Ordinary objects and places become charged with memory; dreams and waking life blur at the edges. Through these incursions of the past he gradually learns that he is linked to a tragic story from the seventeenth century: he is the reincarnation of the lost love of a zealous witch-hunter whose legacy of fear and persecution has not been laid to rest.
As Barney pieces together the old story, supernatural disturbances escalate. The witch-hunter's hatred and the terrible injustices of his time resurface as a malevolent force determined to repeat or settle old scores. Barney must confront this legacy not simply as an external enemy but as something entangled with his own sense of self, history, and responsibility. The climax brings a tense confrontation in which compassion, courage, and an understanding of what truly constitutes evil become crucial.

Themes and motifs
The Haunting examines how history lingers in places and people, and how unacknowledged guilt or cruelty can persist across generations. Reincarnation in the novel is less a gimmick than a device to examine memory, identity, and moral inheritance: Barney's connection to the past forces him to wrestle with questions about culpability and redemption. The book also probes the nature of fear, how it is born, how it spreads, and how it can be resisted.
Mahy is attentive to the ways children perceive the world differently from adults, and the novel leverages childhood imagination and sensitivity as both vulnerability and strength. Themes of love and loyalty run alongside the darker motifs, suggesting that understanding and empathy are as potent against historical wrongs as blunt force.

Characters
Barney Palmer is drawn with psychological nuance: curious, impressionable, and brave in ways that feel believable rather than heroic. The spirit of the seventeenth-century witch-hunter and the memory of his lost love are rendered through fragments of vision and story, giving them an eerie immediacy without flattening them into archetypes. Secondary figures, family members, neighbors, and figures from the past, serve to reflect and contrast the central moral choices facing Barney.
Mahy gives each character a role in illuminating the past's hold on the present, whether as carriers of memory, skeptics, or unwitting perpetuators of fear. This ensemble helps the novel keep its focus on interpersonal dynamics as well as supernatural drama.

Style and impact
Mahy's prose is clear, economical, and lyrically tinged, creating an atmosphere that is haunting without becoming melodramatic. Imagery is often domestic and intimate, which makes the intrusion of the past feel particularly unsettling. The pacing is deliberate, building tension through small, uncanny details until the emotional and supernatural conflicts converge.
The Haunting stands out for treating young readers as capable of grappling with moral complexity and existential unease. It remains a resonant tale about how courage, empathy, and an honest reckoning with history can challenge the persistence of old evils.