Ezri Maxwell doesn’t know whether their childhood home had ghosts, exactly, but they do know that it was haunted: determined to maim, traumatize and scare them and their Black family into leaving their mostly-white Dallas suburb. Desperate to distance themselves from a childhood of constant dread, Ezri and their sisters fled the former model home as soon as they were old enough. Their parents, however, stayed where they were—right until the day they died under mysterious circumstances. In the aftermath of the apparent murder-suicide, the remaining Maxwells must reckon with not only their parents’ deaths, but also their relationships with one another and their past experiences. All the while, they must wrestle with a singular question: Were their parents’ deaths as they seemed, or did they die at the hands of the spirit the three siblings all tacitly agree haunted their childhood from the moment they moved in?
How Rivers Solomon built their terrifying new take on the haunted house.
To call Model Home a haunted house novel is like saying that It is about a clown. Yes, you would technically be correct, but you’d be missing the point. At its core, Rivers Solomon’s latest novel is a study of the interior landscape of someone trying to make sense of their life in the wake of extreme tragedy. Ezri’s head is cluttered with the detritus of trauma, from their mother’s ambivalence toward them as a child to the repercussions of living with mental health issues for years, (“a host of diagnoses—which change with whatever clinician I see”). That emotional clutter often makes Ezri an unconventional narrator, and occasionally it makes them an unreliable one. It also explores how Ezri’s struggles to learn to be a parent mirror their mother’s obvious reluctance to move from academic to full-time mother. Add that to the long-reaching malice of the house itself, and Model Home makes the point that the past doesn’t just inform the present: It haunts it. A disturbing tale that explores self-doubt, family drama and childhood trauma, Model Home is a powerful and gut-wrenching addition to the haunted house pantheon.
