You can tell from the start that Model Home, the latest novel by author Rivers Solomon, is a haunted house tale. Creepy, dark and mysterious, it begins with three siblings being called back to their childhood home in a gated community near Dallas, where the bodies of their parents have been found dead.
Police assume it’s a murder-suicide, but the siblings aren’t convinced. All three — Ezri, Eve and Emmanuel — remember a faceless ghost they call “Nightmare Mother,” and they’re still haunted by the hostility they faced as the only Black family in their wealthy neighborhood. Ezri, who is nonbinary and neurodivergent, recalls gruesome episodes involving dead pets, disappearing friends and bath water tainted with burning acid, and they know there’s something inexplicable and nefarious going on.
As the novel unfolds, Ezri and their siblings are forced to confront the reasons they left and how differently they interpret the past. This is literary horror at its finest, with heavy topics like race, class, identity and mental health finding space alongside a constant hum of psychological dread. Solomon also grapples with generational trauma, and the struggles children face to both understand and escape their family legacies.
Ezri is a well-developed yet wholly unwell character who wonders if they might be the problem: “Was it me all along, deluded and deranged, who made (the house) into something sinister? Is it me who haunts, me who is the ghost?” Suspense builds as you turn the pages, and by the time you meet the monster at the end of this book, you’re questioning your own grasp on reality.
