Mesmerizing, sickening, echoing-hole-in-your-stomach, roller coaster lurch of a creeping inferno: Vincent Tirado’s We Came to Welcome You: A Novel of Suburban Horror is all that and more. Released in the last quarter of 2024, to the tune of “The Other Black Girl meets Midsommar,” the book takes the banal normalcy of racism and colonialism and twists it until its neck snaps.
We open with a slow creep toward a new beginning: Dr. Sol Reyes and her wife, Alice Song, follow their moving truck into an idyllic gated community. Sol is a Black, Dominican butch carrying all the requisite mistrust and anxiety an abusive childhood engenders. She’s also on probation from her prestigious yet low-paying job as a molecular biologist at Yale, due to her straight white male colleague’s unfounded accusations of plagiarism. She’s a neurodivergent-coded character with gut-wrenchingly tender vulnerabilities, and I was rooting for her the entire time. Her wife Alice is Korean, working hard towards a promotion at her marketing job, as bubbly as Sol is introverted. She’s also as brilliantly cheerful and determined to make this a fresh start as Sol is bitter and verging on alcoholism.
The wrongness is subtle at first: an HOA committee that simply won’t take no for an answer. A background static, buzzing like whispers. Something in the vents, probably a mouse. A disappearing stair. These uneasy moments inextricably intertwine with the ever present racist micro- and macro-aggressions. Almost immediately, we see someone assume that Alice is the one with the doctorate working at Yale, not Sol. Later, the couple can’t decide whether it’s more racist to assume that Alice is the doctor because she’s Asian, or that Sol isn’t the doctor because she’s Black.
We Came to Welcome You is truly special in that it gets under your skin and into your head and it stays there. I can’t stop thinking about how perfect a metaphor the neighborhood is for racism; the creeping, insidious way it toys with your thoughts and makes you constantly doubt yourself, how the exhaustion of constant, accreted microaggressions wears you down. How the suffocating pressure to assimilate and conform to the dominant culture applies both to the horror unfolding in the story and to the realities of racism. The way you forget who you are sometimes, while simultaneously never being allowed to forget your status as an outsider. It truly blurs the lines for the reader. Or at least, it did for this reader.
That’s not to say that the book is perfect. The pacing was a little inconsistent and sometimes the explanations seemed to come from the author instead of Sol. Ultimately, the way it all tied together was more tenuous than I’d prefer. It felt a little overstuffed, in that there would be some truly terrifying occurrence or trope, but it wouldn’t be repeated, and I’d wonder why the horror had moved on from that shape. It seemed as though there were too many good bits and they all had to make it in; just a touch more pruning might have kicked it into true five-star status for me.
Still, We Came to Welcome You is one of the best horror books I’ve read in a long time. It lingers, long after the final page. Turns out, the real horror* was the racism we saw along the way!
*The book is also legitimately supernatural horror.
Content warnings: racism, homophobia, physical abuse, violence, body horror, suicide mention
Susanne Salehi (she/they) is a queer Iranian writer happiest when reading, cross stitching, gardening, or accumulating silly tattoos. They write queer heroes. More @susannesalehi or susannesalehi.com.
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