This Queer Horror Book Will Haunt You: Model Home by Rivers Solomon

This was my first Rivers Solomon book, and from the first page, I understood why I’d heard such good things about them. Here are the opening lines: “Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why nothing I do pleases her. Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why even though she’s never once saved me, I keep praying that this time she will. […] Soon, I’ll be a failed deity, too. My daughter is learning not to believe in me.” I had to stop myself from highlighting line after stunning line.

This is in theory a haunted house book, but it’s more about the aftermath. Ezri and their siblings grew up in a house where strange, terrifying things happened to them. Layered with those inexplicable events were their mother’s impossible standards for Black Excellence and the loneliness and racism of growing up the only Black family in a gated community—not to mention the isolation of being a queer, nonbinary, Black, autistic kid in a community that didn’t accept or understand them. We meet Ezri as an adult, struggling to deal with the trauma they’ve endured, especially as they try to raise their teen daughter, Elijah. They’re self-destructive and sometimes dissociate, but they’re also trying to be better for Elijah, who they are raising solo since they found out their ex-wife was trying dangerous methods of “curing” Elijah’s autism.

They moved to England to get away from the family home that so deeply scarred them, but they fly back when their sisters can’t get in contact with their parents. Their mother and father are both found dead at the home, and the police rule it a murder-suicide, but the siblings are convinced the house killed them.

We get a lot of flashbacks to Ezri’s childhood, but this is less about the horror of a haunted house and more about the real-life horrors they’ve endured. It’s disturbing and unsettling, which made it difficult to read at times. Child sexual assault comes up several times, so be aware of that before reading it.

I picked up Model Home because of the promise of the setting, but what kept me reading was Ezri and the relationship between the siblings. Ezri is a complicated character whose trauma has damaged them. We also see them through other people’s eyes, including Elijah’s, who loves her Yoyo but also accepts them as distant, unable to provide the outpouring of emotion she so desperately craves. The siblings are simultaneously close and separated: they seek each other’s attention and reject it. They want to be embraced and they want to hurt each other.

Despite how difficult it was to read Model Home at times, it was ultimately a cathartic experience that had me in tears. It’s a brutal, painful story about desperately fighting to love yourself when you’ve been systematically hurt and rejected. I finished this several days ago, and it is still haunting me. Ezri pops up in my head unexpectedly. I can’t seem to let go of their story.