Lisa Unger Puts a Spin on the Haunted House Novel in “The New Couple in 5B”

The New Couple in 5B by Lisa Unger

New York Times bestselling author Lisa Unger has a tried-and-true method for writing her novels — not a word makes it to the page until the voices start talking. In her latest book, The New Couple in 5B (Park Row), those voices belong to Chad and Rosie, a couple who receive a surprise inheritance of an iconic New York apartment that turns out to be anything but lucky. 

The novel, already a bestseller, is set in a glamorous New York suburban building, modeled, Unger says, after her aunt’s home, a place she visited often in her childhood. 

“The apartment itself was sunlight,” she says, in an interview with BookTrib. “It had an awning, an elevator operator — all the details were painstakingly preserved. But my aunt was a very complicated woman and my visits there were always very layered. One of the things that stuck with me was this idea that you could be in this beautiful place that was also sort of underpinned with something unpredictable, unsafe.” 

Though Unger’s aunt has passed away, her memories of the apartment lingered. This, along with an active imagination and a recent re-read of Ira Levin’s classic and haunting novel, Rosemary’s Baby sowed the seeds for what may be one of Unger’s best novels yet — and that’s saying something. With books published in 33 languages and millions of copies sold worldwide, it’s no wonder Unger is highly regarded as a master of suspense and an author actress Sarah Michelle Geller says she can’t live without. Unger’s previous novel, Confessions on the 7:45, was optioned for film by actress Jessica Alba, who is set to star in the adaptation. 

Given the atmospheric details in The New Couple in 5B, it’s not a stretch to envision this work also making its way to screen. But that’s not what drives Unger to write. With each book she strives to be a better author, to tell a better story, and though it all comes together at the end, Unger’s process is both organic and somewhat chaotic. 

“Nothing’s intentional,” she says, admitting that lead protagonist “Rosie” wasn’t named after the title character in Rosemary’s Baby, despite it being one of the novel’s inspirations. “I have these voices and they just kind of go where they go.”

In The New Couple in 5B, they go to a dark place. While the apartment is meant to be a refuge, for Rosie, it becomes a place haunted — figuratively and literally — by her past. She comes from a family of what she perceives to be charlatans and con artists. Her mother is a tarot card reader, her father a healer. There’s nothing she wants more than to live a normal life with her husband, but soon after moving into the apartment, numerous ominous signs point to the fact that not only is there something not right about their new home, the “visions” Rosie has been trying to ignore aren’t fading into the background. If anything, they’re ramping up. 

Unger is no stranger to peppering supernatural elements into her novels — several books from her impressive backlist skew toward horror — but for The New Couple in 5B, she took a deep dive into the occult. 

“I’ve always been fascinated by tarot cards,” she says. “And in this book, there’s an interesting symbol that has a big role — The Evil Eye. It’s an old symbol, but it represents such a weird dichotomy because it kind of protects against the same thing it invokes in a way.” 

Unger also did a lot of research on being an actor in New York and learned a fascinating fact that didn’t quite make it into the book — theatres leave a constant light on for the ghosts that must surely dwell in them. 

There are “ghosts” in The New Couple in 5B but as to whether Unger believes in them outside of her fiction, the jury’s still out. 

“I see it as a brain event — and there’s a spectrum,” she says. “On the one end, you have a guy like my dad, who if he sees flickering lights, he calls an electrician, whereas someone on the other end of the spectrum, they might think it’s something else. I think I’m somewhere towards the other end, but not all the way there. There’s so much more to this life than we understand.” 

As is her process, Unger continues to explore this spectrum — and more — through masterful storytelling that will in this case leave you wondering whether you should call an electrician, or perhaps explore what else might be going on.