Model Home: A Novel

by Rivers Solomon

Overview

LOCUS AWARD FINALIST

Welcome to Rivers Solomon’s dark and wondrous Model Home, a new kind of haunted-house novel.

The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The neighbors acted nice enough, but right away bad things, scary things—the strange and the unexplainable—began to happen in their house. Maybe it was some cosmic trial, a demonic rite of passage into the upper-middle class. Whatever it was, the Maxwells, steered by their formidable mother, stayed put, unwilling to abandon their home, terrors and trauma be damned.

As adults, the siblings could finally get away from the horrors of home, leaving their parents all alone in the house. But when news of their parents' death arrives, Ezri is forced to return to Texas with their sisters, Eve and Emanuelle, to reckon with their family’s past and present, and to find out what happened while they were away. It was not a “natural” death for their parents . . . but was it supernatural?

Rivers Solomon turns the haunted-house story on its head, unearthing the dark legacies of segregation and racism in the suburban American South. Unbridled, raw, and daring, Model Home is the story of secret histories uncovered, and of a queer family battling for their right to live, grieve, and heal amid the terrors of contemporary American life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374607135
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/01/2024
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Rivers Solomon writes about life in the margins, where they’re much at home. Their work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Short Stories, and other publications. They are the author of An Unkindness of Ghosts, The Deep, and Sorrowland. A refugee of the transatlantic slave trade, Solomon was born on Turtle Island. They currently live in the United Kingdom.

Editorial Reviews

08/12/2024

“My life is a dark woods with a slasher in the midst,” says Ezri Washington Maxwell, the protagonist of this eerie horror novel from Solomon (Sorrowland). Ezri, a highly educated, Black, autistic, intersex single parent, grew up in a predominantly white Texas suburb. Though they have doggedly tried to escape their background, they and their two sisters are forced by the deaths of their parents to reconvene in the family home in a classic haunted house setup. The substance of the horror stems from Ezri grappling with the recall of innumerable tortured moments spent within its walls. The first half of the book is stellar in its evocation of Ezri’s emotional suffocation, past and present. Midway through, however, Ezri latches on to the image of themselves as the tormented child in the Ursula K. LeGuin story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a literary reference that feels somewhat clunky. Meanwhile the intricate, shadowed layers of memory they have laboriously delineated shrivel in the spotlighting of a barely sketched villain. The consequences of evil are as multifaceted and sharp as shattered crystal, while evildoers are sledgehammers without nuance. This may be true enough in life, but it’s a bit of a letdown in fiction. Still, the dazzling atmospherics and sharp-toothed point about race in America will draw readers in. Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Co. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

10/18/2024

In this unique take on the haunted-house story, Ezri and their two sisters must return to their childhood home in an exclusive gated community outside of Dallas after their parents' deaths. When they moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. While at first everything seemed fine, the home was quickly filled with terror as the three children experienced unexplainable horrors, which the family believed were caused by the house itself. While Ezri, Eve, and Emmanuelle all escaped, their parents remained in the house. Now, the true nature of the strange and terrible things that happened in the house, as well as the truth about the past, must be confronted. In this reimagining of a long-standing trope, Solomon (Sorrowland) explores trauma, abuse, mental illness, gender, and family bonds within a thought-provoking psychological horror novel. VERDICT This is an intense read with an increasing sense of unease as more and more of the truth is revealed. It will appeal to readers interested in exploring childhood trauma, secrets, and their long-term effects as in Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey or The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher.—Lila Denning

Library Journal

Gabby Beans performs this suspenseful novel about a Black nonbinary protagonist who is haunted by the events that occurred at their childhood home. After years of living in the UK, Ezri finds themself on a plane back to the U.S. to visit their parents in their suburban home outside Dallas, Texas. There, Ezri finds their parents dead and begins trying to reconstruct their last moments. Beans's narration captures the dialogue of Ezri and their two sisters, highlighting the vibrant dynamic between them. Beans's approach creates emotional depth for the siblings as they work through the trauma of their pasts and confront the horrific truths they've fought so hard to forget. K.D.W. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2024 - AudioFile

★ 2024-07-11
A family tragedy occasions this startling reimagination of the haunted-house genre.

Ezri Maxwell and their sisters, Eve and Emmanuelle, have begun receiving increasingly alarming texts from their mother. Or, rather, someone claiming to be their mother. When Ezri was a teen, admission to Oxford University granted them—Black, nonbinary, and neurodivergent—the ideal escape from the hostile, entirely white gated community outside of Dallas in which their parents, seeking upward mobility, made a home. Ezri’s childhood was haunted by frightening, unexplainable occurrences for which they were often blamed, and they’ve been estranged from their parents since leaving home. The siblings have suspected for years that something dark, supernatural, haunts the rooms of 677 Acacia Drive. Yet their parents—unyielding, clinging to their upper-middle-class life—have refused to budge. When communication abruptly stops between their sisters and parents, Ezri must return to Dallas with their daughter, Elijah, in tow. After nearly two decades, Ezri revisits 677, where they find both parents dead. Though the local police report that the Maxwells planned a murder-suicide, the siblings are far from convinced. They can’t agree, however, on whether their parents were killed by supernatural forces or not. In evocative prose, Solomon harnesses and recasts classic horror tropes to tell an original story of race and class, family, trauma, and grief. Each character—including the parents—is finely rendered, with the dynamic among the siblings illustrating the ways loyalties shift and change, in constant renegotiation, and dramatizing the ruptures activated by traumatic events. The novel’s construction is elliptical, with past and present alternating from chapter to chapter. Most are narrated by Ezri, with a few shifts in perspective. While this may throw some readers off, the twists and turns are carefully drawn, with the tension mounting toward a shocking end. Readers should be aware that the novel features themes of grooming and child sex abuse, and Solomon is thoughtful in their treatment of these heavy issues.

With this exhilarating and unforgettable work, Solomon proves to be a formidable writer.

Kirkus Reviews

"Rivers Solomon, a master of horror and speculative fiction, twists familiar tropes to consider the traumas of modern life . . . Solomon, pulling the reader from past to present and back again, is a masterful story architect tackling themes of race, class and family trauma, layering the narrative with tension, suspense and the uncertainty borne of a questionable narrator . . . Model Home forces readers to think deeper about mental health, abuse and the concept of family. It’s not your typical haunted house story, but those interested in the horrors and traumas of contemporary life will devour this twisty supernatural horror."

—Saraciea J. Fennell, The Washington Post

"Solomon reimagines the haunted-house genre in this poignant exploration of the ghosts that “unexorcisable, go on inside of us”: namely, our parents and our childhoods . . . In chapters alternating between past and present, Solomon evokes the real-life horrors of racism, abuse, and generational trauma, deftly exploring how a human being can become a quasi-haunted house. Coming on the heels of Sorrowland and The Unkindness of Ghosts, Model Home proves Solomon’s tremendous talent for reinventing genre stories."

—Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

"After their parents—onetime paragons of “Black Excellence”—meet a grisly death in the affluent, white gated community in Texas where their family once lived, Ezri is summoned back to their childhood home, a place they have long regarded as haunted. As Ezri and their sisters parse supernatural horrors from earthbound ones, Solomon succeeds in evoking an atmosphere in which there is more than one way to feel haunted."

—The New Yorker

"Solomon’s genre-defying achievement subverts and reclaims the tropes of the gothic haunted house to create something wholly original and unforgettable."

—Booklist, starred review

“[A] startling reimagination of the haunted-house genre . . . In evocative prose, Solomon harnesses and recasts classic horror tropes to tell an original story of race and class, family, trauma, and grief. Each character . . . is finely rendered, with the dynamic among the siblings illustrating the ways loyalties shift and change, in constant renegotiation, and dramatizing the ruptures activated by traumatic events. The novel’s construction is elliptical, with past and present alternating from chapter to chapter [and Solomon’s] twists and turns are carefully drawn, with the tension mounting toward a shocking end . . . With this exhilarating and unforgettable work, Solomon proves to be a formidable writer.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“ A profoundly haunting work of true horror from one of the greatest writers working today.”

—Sarah Gailey, author of Just Like Home and Magic for Liars

“Intense, original, and wonderfully unpredictable—those adjectives describe Rivers Solomon as much as this novel. Model Home is a story of a haunted house and haunted people; profound family secrets lie at the heart of this book as well as, surprisingly, blessedly meaningful touches of love and hope. Rivers Solomon is an astonishingly talented writer.”

—Victor LaValle , author of Lone Women and The Changeling

From the Publisher