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.
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.
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Find Model Home Rivers Solomon in PDF, EPUB, ebook, audiobook, print, or library editions.
Find Model Home Rivers Solomon in PDF, EPUB, ebook, audiobook, print, or library editions.
4 books in catalog
Speculative fiction that examines race, trauma, and survival in heavily stratified worlds has established a vital space in modern science fiction and fantasy. Rivers Solomon gained critical recognition with their 2017 debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, which depicts life aboard a generation starship structured around strict racial hierarchies. Writing about life in the margins, Solomon crafts narrative landscapes where marginalized voices navigate survival, historical memory, and systemic oppression.
Born on Turtle Island in the United States, Solomon grew up across California, Indiana, Texas, and New York. They graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity before earning a Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. Solomon was named a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and received the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction for An Unkindness of Ghosts. Their prose has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and The Best American Short Stories. Solomon subsequently relocated to Cambridge, England, where they currently live in the United Kingdom with their family.
Solomon's writing bridges science fiction, gothic fantasy, and horror to explore themes of colonialism, bodily autonomy, gender identity, and intergenerational trauma. A refugee of the transatlantic slave trade, Solomon frequently situates their stories in liminal environments where characters confront institutional power structures and reconstruct suppressed histories. Their fiction combines meticulous speculative world-building with intense, character-driven narrative arcs.
4 books in catalog
Speculative fiction that examines race, trauma, and survival in heavily stratified worlds has established a vital space in modern science fiction and fantasy. Rivers Solomon gained critical recognition with their 2017 debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, which depicts life aboard a generation starship structured around strict racial hierarchies. Writing about life in the margins, Solomon crafts narrative landscapes where marginalized voices navigate survival, historical memory, and systemic oppression.
Born on Turtle Island in the United States, Solomon grew up across California, Indiana, Texas, and New York. They graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity before earning a Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. Solomon was named a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and received the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction for An Unkindness of Ghosts. Their prose has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and The Best American Short Stories. Solomon subsequently relocated to Cambridge, England, where they currently live in the United Kingdom with their family.
Solomon's writing bridges science fiction, gothic fantasy, and horror to explore themes of colonialism, bodily autonomy, gender identity, and intergenerational trauma. A refugee of the transatlantic slave trade, Solomon frequently situates their stories in liminal environments where characters confront institutional power structures and reconstruct suppressed histories. Their fiction combines meticulous speculative world-building with intense, character-driven narrative arcs.
