I recently saw a video on Instagram where someone talked about books that they gave five stars but wouldn’t necessarily recommend to others, and that kind of sums up how I feel about Model Home by Rivers Solomon. This is a well-written, well-paced, thought-provoking book which is also probably the most disturbing and joyless thing I’ve read all year. This is not a fun haunted house romp; at its core, Model Home is about the very real horrors of the world.
Part of what makes this book so simultaneously compelling but hard to read is our first-person narrator, Ezri Maxwell. The book is very strongly told in their voice. They also have what feels like the most self-loathing I have ever encountered in a character. They have a collection of mental health diagnoses, a troubled past, internalized trans- and homophobia, and questions about their ability to parent their teenage daughter, Elijah.
When Ezri’s parents stop returning phone calls and texts, Ezri is compelled to come back to the gated Texas community where they grew up; all three Maxwell siblings left home as soon as possible due to the haunting that made their childhood terrifying and miserable, but their parents clung to the respectability and status of their beautiful home in an otherwise all-white community. Now, surprise, they have passed away, and Ezri must unravel the truth of what happened to them, and what happened to the entire family when Ezri and their sisters were growing up.
What makes this book such compelling reading is how Solomon doles out information in tiny parcels, building your sense of dread as you start to get an idea of how bad things really were in the house, and what was really going on.
While this is allegedly a book about a haunted house, and also a book about race in America, it’s also very much a book about things like generational trauma, and how as each generation of parents tries to not repeat the mistakes their parents made, they instead make all-new mistakes and mess up their kids in all-new ways. We don’t get a lot of insight into how Ezri’s parents grew up, but we can really see how they, and especially their mother, really thought that making a lot of money and raising their kids in a dream home in an upscale neighborhood, sending them to good schools, would allow them to have a better, happier life.
We see Ezri’s mother striving to be a good, progressive mother who accepts her child’s genderqueer identity in a time when few kids were out with any sort of gender-non-conforming identity, but we also see how much she buys into respectability politics and uses that as a weapon against her children to try to compel better behavior. And of course, we see how all three children were hurt in different ways by their parents’ refusal to leave the terrifying home that left them with scars, emotional and sometimes physical.
Ezri, in turn, tries to be a good parent to Elijah, living in a home that should feel cozy and safe, but their mental illness creates its own parenting struggles, which contributes to a B-plot about Elijah finding herself in a dangerous situation that her parent is unaware of.
I can’t say that I enjoyed reading this book. Like I said, it was joyless. Ezri is a hard narrator to spend time with. Books with complicated parental situations can be hard for me too. And then there’s the list of trigger warnings that I’ll get to shortly. But with all that said, this was definitely a valuable reading experience for me. It was interesting to see how Solomon used the haunted house format to explore a number of concepts. Horror doesn’t always have to be about cheap thrills; it often works best when it’s using our fears as a lens to explore society’s ills.
And so, I wouldn’t unreservedly recommend this book, even to people who generally enjoy horror. I think you have to consider the themes of the book, and look at the content warnings, and decide if this is the right book for you. Horror is a tricky genre, and what really works for one person can be terribly boring to another and too disturbing for another. It’s a genre I only dip into every now and then, when something catches my eye in terms of themes, or when an author I’ve read in other genres decides it’s time to take a walk on the creepy side. I definitely wouldn’t recommend this as your first foray into horror, unless you know you can handle disturbing content.
CWs and TWs: Racism; internalized and external homophobia and transphobia; pedophilia; unpleasant sexual encounters; disordered eating; parental death; pet death; ableism; emotional abuse; coarse language; suicide; violence.
Source and Format: I read this as an ebook from Sno-Isle Libraries.
Book Bingo Prompts
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): For a Shot of Adrenaline. I’ve been waiting all year for a book to give me a real jolt, but it’s the rare book that actually scares me; most just give me a sense of unease. So I selected this book, because for sure, if the things that happened to Ezri and their sisters happened to me, the adrenaline would be coursing through my veins.
Book Bingo Progress
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 21 out of 25 prompts complete. 5 bingos.
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 18 out of 25 prompts complete. 3 bingos.