Few writers working today write about bodies as memorably as Rivers Solomon. The setting of their 2017 novel An Unkindness of Ghosts was a generation ship, and the book abounded with moments that describe characters’ relationships to their own bodies and the way that that can evolve over time. (A Morgan Thomas essay memorably delves into this in greater detail.) Their novella The Deep—a collaboration with the group clipping.—involves a society of humans who evolved in response to the transatlantic slave trade. The plot of Solomon’s 2021 book Sorrowland involves a fungus that can radically reshape human bodies, giving them new abilities along the way.
Bodies also factor prominently in their new book Model House, about three semi-estranged siblings who reunite in the aftermath of their parents’ death. And if you think that there might be an ominous presence lingering in the family home, you’d be absolutely correct. But that isn’t the only concern that these characters are dealing with. In one scene early in the book, narrator Ezri describes returning to Texas with their daughter Elijah; waiting for them are Ezri’s sisters Emmanuelle and Eve. This brief description of their experience on the plane roots Ezri’s experience in being a person with a body making their way in the world:
Elijah and I have a row of five seats to ourselves in the middle section of the plane, but she sits right next to me, raises the armrest between us so our hips touch and our fat rolls join. Her locs, each one the thickness of a finger, are bound into a large elastic, and the bundle falls onto my shoulders.
For all that Model Home eventually goes to some surreal and uncanny places, it’s also situated in plenty of lived-in experiences. That helps to keep this book grounded, even when its language turns hallucinatory; it also gets at the heart of one of the big questions this novel poses, which is: What kind of haunted house story is this, anyway?
For starters, it’s one with a theological dimension. The first sentence of the novel goes there: “Maybe my mother is god, and that’s why nothing I do pleases her.” And soon after that, Ezri expands their focus to include themselves: “One day soon, I’ll be a failed deity, too. My daughter is learning not to believe in me.” Already, the realm of the familiar and the divine are overlapping; before long, Ezri concedes that the family home isn’t necessarily haunted in the classical sense, but that it does nonetheless seethe with a personality of its own:
Its hate for us is so personal, we sometimes weren’t sure we hadn’t wronged it and just forgot about what we’d done. That this is its revenge. Only a serious violation on our part could explain this level of calculated fury.
Other details help make this novel feel even more lived-in. There are the details of how Ezri’s parents moved from Brooklyn to the Dallas suburbs, where they were the only Black family in their development, Oak Creek Estates. There’s Ezri’s memory of her mother placing a print of Jenny Holzer’s Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise on one wall in their home. Ezri’s parents, Eudora Washington and Edward Maxwell, also had a penchant for giving their children names beginning with the letter “E”—a tradition Ezri has continued.
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Model Home
There are other characters at the outskirts of this story as well, from the police officer attempting to learn what happened to the siblings’ parents to Lily, a musician who takes an interest in Elijah. There’s the Nightmare Mother, a figure who lurks in Ezri’s memory; for much of the novel, it’s not entirely clear who or what she is. Is the Nightmare Mother a terrifying version of Eudora at her angriest? A projection of Ezri’s younger mind? Something else entirely? An unsettling ambiguity runs throughout the book—but it’s clear from very early on that something is very wrong in the Oak Creek Estates house.
After [Emmanuelle] had almost died, she told the tennis coach that our neighborhood was a demon and that our house was its belly. It’s digesting us, she said, referring to the bath I’d run her a month or so before that had been tainted with sulfuric acid.
That excerpt took an unexpected turn, didn’t it? It’s indicative of how Solomon structured this book: Horrifying things happen, but they also do so unexpectedly. It isn’t hard to imagine a different version of this book where the sulfuric acid revelation happens at the end of a chapter for maximum impact. Here, it’s less a jump scare and more the realization that the monster has been lurking in the background all along.
The way that Model Home moves between past and present (and, later in the book, to a few scenes written in a third-person perspective) leaves the reader suspended between the two—much as Ezri is consumed by their own memories of the past and the trauma they experienced there. Other scenes follow a nightmarish logic all their own, especially Ezri’s encounter with another Oak Creek Estates resident, Keith, which finds new levels of harrowing disquiet as it continues.
Model Home is a chilling book in many ways, from its exploration of childhood trauma to Ezri’s reckoning with their own fallibility to the broader questions of being fundamentally at odds with a community. Ezri alludes to Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” several times over the course of the book. Much like Holzer’s artwork mentioned earlier, it adds another dimension to an already textually rich novel. What ends up being the more terrifying thought: the idea that you had experienced unspeakable horrors when you were younger or the idea that you had never stopped? In Solomon’s novel, that uncertainty might be the most unsettling thing of all.
