Model Home
A Novel
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A dark force is terrorizing the residents of 677 Acacia Drive in this chilling literary horror novel that flips the haunted-house trope on its head. At 16, Ezri Maxwell escaped the otherworldly torments of their seemingly idyllic home in an affluent Dallas neighbourhood, moving halfway across the world to England. While they vowed never to return, a frantic call from their siblings brings them back to the site of their childhood trauma, only to discover their mother and father dead from an apparent murder-suicide. But Ezri knows the truth: It was the house that killed their parents. From the start, we were hooked by author Rivers Solomon’s stylish prose as well their unreliable but fascinating main character, Ezri, a nonbinary person of colour with a history of mental illness. Everything about Ezri, including their personality, gender expression, and memories of their youth, shifts along with the story, creating an incredibly disquieting effect that left us questioning everything. Model Home is a brilliant tale of love, generational trauma, and the search for acceptance, making it more than just another haunted-house tale.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"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.
