The horror genre, like most genres, has been long-dominated by white authors. I have been on a quest to search out more horror writers of color because their notion of what is horrifying is going to be intensely different than what is horrifying for white authors. Many white authors position people of color as being the monster or part of the horror, but horror authors of color depict (more convincingly in my opinion) white people and the hegemony we’ve created as the true horror.

This thesis is ably depicted in Rivers Solomon’s latest book, Model Home. The novel centers on three siblings: Ezri, Eve, and Emanuelle. Ezri is our main narrator, leading the reader on a circuitous route of exploring the horrors that the whole family, but particularly the siblings and their mother, faced in their house. Significantly, this family is the only Black family in an affluent neighborhood. When Ezri and Eve were young, the family moved from New York City to a suburb of Dallas in the pursuit of a lower cost of living that would allow them to buy a massive house in a good neighborhood to secure good education for their children and live the life their hard work earned them.

Fairly quickly strange and terrifying things start to happen, seemingly perpetuated by a mysterious figure Ezri calls the woman without a face. Pets are killed; guests disappear; the children are horribly injured. Many of these acts lead back to Ezri, which obviously shapes their relationship with their family and themselves. Despite a promising future—they were accepted in Oxford—they cannot escape the trauma they have experienced as their dissociative identity disorder dominates their life, hindering their ability to form any relationships including with their own daughter, Elijah. The plot of the novel picks up when Ezri receives a text from Nightmare Mother shortly followed by a text from their sister telling them to come home; she already has a plane ticket for them and Elijah. When Ezri arrives in Dallas and visits their childhood house of horrors, they discover their parents dead in the backyard. The deaths are officially declared a double suicide or a murder-suicide, but Ezri and their sisters are convinced the house is to blame.

Each of the siblings has dealt with their childhoods in different ways. Emanuelle, the youngest, was sent to boarding school when she was eight or nine to get away from the house. Since she spent the least amount of time in the house, she feels as if she is missing out on some key experience that bonded her two older siblings. Although she acknowledges that what they underwent was horrible, she has a streak of jealousy. Eve has done her best to make a life for her two children that is the exact opposite of her own upbringing. She is trying to put the past behind her as much as possible even as her daily actions are ruled by the past. Ezri, as I said before, developed dissociative identity disorder, a disorder that arises in childhood as a way for the child to cope with trauma, often ongoing and “extreme” trauma.

Although the siblings are very different, both in personality and how they cope with everything, they also support and love each other unconditionally. This was one of the highlights of the book for me. Realistic siblings relationships are not depicted enough in literature and media in my opinion so having a book that really focused on sibling relationships, specifically adult sibling relationships, was refreshing. Sibling relationships are complicated; your siblings are often the people who know all of your most embarrassing, intimate, traumatic, and happy moments from your childhood even if you weren’t and aren’t close to your siblings. I have three siblings myself, all younger, and there’s a sense of secret-keeping between us. There are things we know about each other that no one else knows or very few people know. We also are the only people who truly understand our parents and their quirks in the specific way those things affected us as children. There’s a very specific intimacy between siblings that Solomon depicts very well here.

Less successful in my opinion was Elijah’s storyline. I understand what Solomon was going for with her arc—showing the way trauma is perpetuated but also can be broken—but I didn’t find the execution compelling or convincing. I felt it mostly distracted from the main plot and also painted Ezri as being inherently a bad parent because of their mental disorder. Although I believe the representation of dissociative identity disorder is significantly better than how it is depicted in most media (for instance, Ezri doesn’t have a secret serial killer persona), I was uncomfortable with the implications about Ezri and Elijah’s relationship.

Although I had some quibbles with the ending and part of the twist, ultimately I found this a moving and compelling book that highlighted the racism and racial tensions around wealth, class, and housing. The most compelling element of that analysis is tied up in the twist at the end of the book so I won’t say more, but I loved the ultimate reveal about the secret of the house and the neighborhood. A thought-provoking novel that reveals to me, as a white reader, the everyday horrors of Black families I can easily ignore to the point of ignorance.