One night, a spirit pounds on fourteen-year-old Becky's bedroom door, calling her by name and demanding she come out. Having just survived the worst week of her life (spurred by the discovery of her name on a list of "Ugly Freshmen" in a bathroom stall at her high school), all she can do is collapse into the corner and cry, convinced that the dead have conspired with the living to hijack her safety and self-worth.

Becky doesn't know Barbara, whose husband has been taken prisoner during World War II in the Pacific, or Lester, an unemployed loser who prefers MTV to social interaction, both of whom lived in her house well before she was born. She also doesn't know Charles, who alienates the family he built the house for at the beginning of the century, or Preston, an unfulfilled civil servant who hosts concerts in the house's basement, though they know her.

Spanning five points of view and time periods, Friday Night at Humble House tells the story of five wayward individuals and the house that gave them life. As Becky comes face to face with the souls that haunt her house's past (both alive and deceased), she must summon the courage to reclaim control-of her identity, her dignity, her trajectory-or succumb to the tragedies of those who occupied the house before her.