Model Home by Rivers Solomon: Review by Gabino Iglesias
Model Home, Rivers Solomon (MCD 978-0-37460-713-5, $28.00, 304pp, hc) October 2024. Cover by Abby Kagan.
Rivers Solomon’s Model Home is a novel about a haunted house in which said house sits in the background while haunted people take center stage. Stunningly written and full of the kind of trauma that can only come from family, this novel takes the haunted house trope and turns it into something that feels entirely new, very fresh, and packing an emotional punch that lingers way after you turn the last page.
Ezri and her sisters, Eve and Emanuelle, have very different lives, but they have all worked hard at the same thing: staying away from the suburban Dallas home in which they grew up, a place in which they were the only Black family. Sadly, now they have to go back. Ezri’s parents are dead, so the sisters must return. The loss of their parents is a shock, but the sisters’ main concern is the house where their parents died, the same house where they grew up; the place is haunted. It was a place where strange, bad things happened. It was a place from which their mother would pull them in the middle of the night. A bad place. And now the Maxwells are back, and they all know the house might have been responsible for their parents’ deaths. Haunted not only by memories of the house and the trauma that left them with, now the sisters must also face the trauma they have accumulated since leaving home, their collective past, and their individual demons.
I said “stunningly written” in the first paragraph, but that doesn’t quite cover it. Solomon tackles a lot of important themes here – motherhood, grief, gender, depression – but they do so while also paying attention to every sentence, to finding the perfect way to convey a huge sentiment in a few words: “I’m not a person but a place where bad things happen.” Lines like that are sprinkled in almost every page, and they make the big ideas and emotions of the narrative slice into the reader with their precision.
Besides the writing itself and the compelling, bizarre story Solomon tells here, this novel is also interesting because it doesn’t focus too much on the supernatural side of horror the way a haunted house story usually does, but still manages to embrace horror completely and very openly. Horror has always been a lens, an atmosphere, and that is always present here, even when the most horrific elements in the story come from real life experiences.
Solomon is a very talented storyteller with a unique voice, and this novel shows them at the height of their powers. Model Home is always intense and unpredictable. It goes into strange places and not every surprise is equally powerful, but the wild ride is strange, scary, sad, and totally worth it
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin TX. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides. His work has been nominated to the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. His short stories have appeared in a plethora of anthologies and his non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and CrimeReads. His work has been published in five languages, optioned for film, and praised by authors as diverse as Roxane Gay, David Joy, Jerry Stahl, and Meg Gardiner. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other print and online venues. He’s been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice and has judged the PANK Big Book Contest, the Splatterpunk Awards, and the Newfound Prose Prize. He teaches creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University’s online MFA program. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
This review and more like it in the December 2024 issue of Locus.
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