BookBrowse Reviews Model Home by Rivers Solomon

BookBrowse:

A domestic horror thriller with an intricately woven plot and a warm, beating heart.

Rivers Solomon's novel Model Home opens with a chilling and mesmerizing line: "Maybe my mother is God, and that's why nothing I do pleases her." The book is narrated by Ezri Maxwell, who grew up Black and nonbinary in a white gated community, and who wonders, upon reentering the area as an adult, what the point is of having a guard regulating entry: "To keep the bad people out? Every guard will fail at that because the bad people are already inside. This is their fort."

In this scene, Ezri, who left for an Oxford education when they were sixteen, has returned from the UK to the Dallas suburbs and to their sisters Eve and Emmanuelle, with their teenage daughter Elijah in tow. After entering their childhood home, they find their parents dead in the backyard — police are soon declaring it a murder-suicide. Ezri and their sisters experienced many eerie occurrences in the house in their youth for which there seems to be no readily available explanation: Emmanuelle was burned by sulfuric acid that somehow got into her bathwater, animals mysteriously died, a boy who agreed to stay in the house alone once on a dare disappeared and was never seen again. The reader has limited perspective into what Eve and Emmanuelle (and even Ezri, whose first-person narration features incomplete and confusing memories) really think about these happenings, but now, reunited years later and in mourning, the siblings are forced to reckon with what power the house has and what role it may have played in their parents' deaths.

Ezri still feels resentful towards their parents, and particularly their mother, who they perceived as stubborn, proud, and elistist for having insisted on remaining in a neighborhood harmful to them in more ways than one. The first line of the novel ignites an ongoing, pulsing poetic meditation that repeats the incantation-like phrase "Mother is God." Reflections on Ezri's actual mother are countered and muddled by their memories of (and seeming interactions with) someone referred to as Nightmare Mother and the "woman without a face." As Ezri and their siblings seek to resolve the mystery of their parents' death and the reader explores the unfolding chaos of Ezri's thoughts, Ezri's childhood experiences begin to cohere with current reality. Meanwhile, a subplot forms around Elijah's secret relationship with a woman named Lily, whom the reader can identify as a predator but of whose presence and influence Ezri is wholly unaware, preoccupied as they are by thoughts of the house and their parents' funeral.

Model Home is openly a horror story built on social and political realities, in which the lurking evil is understood to be racism and the horrors it enables. This is not the revelation or even the lesson of the novel, but a given, and the riches of the plot that ensues — terrifying but also entertaining, sweet, and sometimes hilarious in a way that can scarcely be described (in one flashback, when Ezri's mother thinks they aren't being enthusiastic enough about a night out, they proclaim, "I want to go more than I've ever wanted to go anywhere in my entire life! I have dreamed about going to a restaurant on a Wednesday night since I was a wee child. A wee sick Victorian child!") — are for those who accept this premise without needing to be convinced. It is a book generously and unapologetically for the victims, without interest in laboring over the complexity of racists and abusers, but rather in tending the nuanced perspectives of those forced to deal with the blunt damage done to them, those already keenly aware of the layers of humanity employed by others as a device to gain and take advantage of their trust.

In fact, the novel interrogates the concept of "humanity" as a perceived moral good, asking whether it might be more accurate to see it as a notion associated with sensitivity, intelligence, multifacetedness, and greater understanding that is used to obscure violence and maintain racial hierarchy. In another flashback, the siblings' mother, an academic who gave up her career for her children, refers to "the white colonialist assumption that humankind is separate from and above the rest of animal kind, justifying human dominion over it. How powerful it would be for us to be called animals and say, Yes, yes, of course. And what does that make you? Not animal? Not flesh? Not alive?"

Solomon's novel retains a mood of classic horror, of shadows lurking in dark corners, but in structure, it ends up feeling more like a thriller with horror elements than the reverse. It has a genuine mystery. Readers need not fear an ambiguous ending. Some may find the neat lining up of plot incidents a bit hard to swallow, but the story, while it eventually reveals the strings being pulled behind the curtain, is content to create its own reality, which feels deliberately constructed at every turn. It is, finally, a tale of the recovery and reinvention of a family broken from its traditional base, of sibling bonds and love that has persisted even without being named or understood.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in October 2024, and has been updated for the December 2024 edition. Click here to go to this issue.