Model Home

The Maxwell siblings have spent their adult lives staying away from the Dallas subdivision where they grew up — the only Black family in a gated enclave where strange, terrible things began happening as soon as they moved in. When their parents die, Ezri returns with her sisters Eve and Emanuelle to close the house and reckon with a childhood they have never discussed honestly with each other. Rivers Solomon inverts the haunted house formula, turning it toward questions of race, family silence, and the cost of staying in places that were never meant for you.

Gabby Beans narrates with the emotional precision this psychologically dense novel demands — the siblings' distinct voices, their specific ways of having survived the same house, require a narrator capable of holding multiple registers simultaneously. Locus Award winner for Horror in 2025. At just under nine hours, Model Home is a compact and unsettling novel that uses genre conventions in the service of something larger.