Model Home by Rivers Solomon

Model Home by Rivers Solomon

LOCUS AWARD FINALIST

Welcome to Rivers Solomon's dark and wondrous Model Home, a new kind of haunted-house novel.

The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave outside Dallas where they grew up. When their family moved there, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The neighbors acted nice enough, but right away bad things, scary things--the strange and the unexplainable--began to happen in their house. Maybe it was some cosmic trial, a demonic rite of passage into the upper-middle class. Whatever it was, the Maxwells, steered by their formidable mother, stayed put, unwilling to abandon their home, terrors and trauma be damned.

As adults, the siblings could finally get away from the horrors of home, leaving their parents all alone in the house. But when news of their parents' death arrives, Ezri is forced to return to Texas with their sisters, Eve and Emanuelle, to reckon with their family's past and present, and to find out what happened while they were away. It was not a "natural" death for their parents . . . but was it supernatural?

Rivers Solomon turns the haunted-house story on its head, unearthing the dark legacies of segregation and racism in the suburban American South. Unbridled, raw, and daring, Model Home is the story of secret histories uncovered, and of a queer family battling for their right to live, grieve, and heal amid the terrors of contemporary American life.

Rivers Solomon writes about living on the periphery, a place where people feel at ease. Solomon's debut novel An Unkindness of Ghosts was a finalist for a Lambda, a Hurston/Wright, an Otherwise (previously Tiptree), and a Locus award, in addition to being on the Stonewall Honor List and earning a Firecracker Award. The Deep, Solomon's second book, was the winner of the 2020 Lambda Award and was shortlisted for a Nebula, Locus, Hugo, Ignyte, Brooklyn Library Literary, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy award. It was adapted on the Hugo-nominated song by Daveed Diggs-fronted hip-hop trio clipping. Solomon's short fiction has been or will appear in Black Warrior Review, the New York Times Magazine, Guernica, Best American Short Tales, Tor.com, Best American Horror and Dark Fantasy, and other publications. Solomon was born on Turtle Island but now lives on an island in an archipelago off the western coast of the Eurasian continent, a survivor of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade.