The horror genre, like most genres, has been long-dominated by white authors. I have been on a quest to search out more horror writers of color because their notion of what is horrifying is going to be intensely different than what is horrifying for white authors. Many white authors position people of color as being the monster or part of the horror, but horror authors of color depict (more convincingly in my opinion) white people and the hegemony we’ve created as the true horror.

This thesis is ably depicted in Rivers Solomon’s latest book, Model Home. The novel centers on three siblings: Ezri, Eve, and Emanuelle. Ezri is our main narrator, leading the reader on a circuitous route of exploring the horrors that the whole family, but particularly the siblings and their mother, faced in their house. Significantly, this family is the only Black family in an affluent neighborhood. When Ezri and Eve were young, the family moved from New York City to a suburb of Dallas in the pursuit of a lower cost of living that would allow them to buy a massive house in a good neighborhood to secure good education for their children and live the life their hard work earned them.

Fairly quickly strange and terrifying things start to happen, seemingly perpetuated by a mysterious figure Ezri calls the woman without a face. Pets are killed; guests disappear; the children are horribly injured. Many of these acts lead back to Ezri, which obviously shapes their relationship with their family and themselves. Despite a promising future—they were accepted in Oxford—they cannot escape the trauma they have experienced as their dissociative identity disorder dominates their life, hindering their ability to form any relationships including with their own daughter, Elijah. The plot of the novel picks up when Ezri receives a text from Nightmare Mother shortly followed by a text from their sister telling them to come home; she already has a plane ticket for them and Elijah. When Ezri arrives in Dallas and visits their childhood house of horrors, they discover their parents dead in the backyard. The deaths are officially declared a double suicide or a murder-suicide, but Ezri and their sisters are convinced the house is to blame.

Each of the siblings has dealt with their childhoods in different ways. Emanuelle, the youngest, was sent to boarding school when she was eight or nine to get away from the house. Since she spent the least amount of time in the house, she feels as if she is missing out on some key experience that bonded her two older siblings. Although she acknowledges that what they underwent was horrible, she has a streak of jealousy. Eve has done her best to make a life for her two children that is the exact opposite of her own upbringing. She is trying to put the past behind her as much as possible even as her daily actions are ruled by the past. Ezri, as I said before, developed dissociative identity disorder, a disorder that arises in childhood as a way for the child to cope with trauma, often ongoing and “extreme” trauma.

Although the siblings are very different, both in personality and how they cope with everything, they also support and love each other unconditionally. This was one of the highlights of the book for me. Realistic siblings relationships are not depicted enough in literature and media in my opinion so having a book that really focused on sibling relationships, specifically adult sibling relationships, was refreshing. Sibling relationships are complicated; your siblings are often the people who know all of your most embarrassing, intimate, traumatic, and happy moments from your childhood even if you weren’t and aren’t close to your siblings. I have three siblings myself, all younger, and there’s a sense of secret-keeping between us. There are things we know about each other that no one else knows or very few people know. We also are the only people who truly understand our parents and their quirks in the specific way those things affected us as children. There’s a very specific intimacy between siblings that Solomon depicts very well here.

Less successful in my opinion was Elijah’s storyline. I understand what Solomon was going for with her arc—showing the way trauma is perpetuated but also can be broken—but I didn’t find the execution compelling or convincing. I felt it mostly distracted from the main plot and also painted Ezri as being inherently a bad parent because of their mental disorder. Although I believe the representation of dissociative identity disorder is significantly better than how it is depicted in most media (for instance, Ezri doesn’t have a secret serial killer persona), I was uncomfortable with the implications about Ezri and Elijah’s relationship.

Although I had some quibbles with the ending and part of the twist, ultimately I found this a moving and compelling book that highlighted the racism and racial tensions around wealth, class, and housing. The most compelling element of that analysis is tied up in the twist at the end of the book so I won’t say more, but I loved the ultimate reveal about the secret of the house and the neighborhood. A thought-provoking novel that reveals to me, as a white reader, the everyday horrors of Black families I can easily ignore to the point of ignorance.

One of the my biggest pet peeves in the book world is when the blurb of the book technically matches the book but doesn’t really capture it—this is even more annoying to me when the blurb lets me down instead of the book surprising me.

The first offense comes in the header: From Bram Stoker Award­–winning author Gwendolyn Kiste comes a chilling novel about three childhood friends who miraculously survive the night everyone in their suburban hometown turned into ghosts—perfect for fans of Yellowjackets.

Besides the fact “everyone in the suburban hometown turned into ghosts” is not exactly accurate to what happens in the book, comparing this book to Yellowjackets is wildly inaccurate. Yes, this book is about 40-year-old women dealing with something that happened when they were 20—so that retrospective element is there—the style of horror of The Haunting of Velkwood is nothing like the horror of Yellowjackets. The goals of these two pieces of media are nothing alike; the characterization shares practically nothing. I have no idea who was in charge of that comparison, but it is wildly off-base.

Then we move into the inside flap copy itself: The Velkwood Vicinity was the topic of occult theorists, tabloid one-hour documentaries, and even some pseudo-scientific investigations as the block of homes disappeared behind a near-impenetrable veil that only three survivors could enter—and only one has in the past twenty years, until now.

The set-up of the story implies there will be a focus on the theorizing, etc. While there are scientists in the book who serve an important function (I actually quite liked them; I’ll come back to that), that’s far from the main point of the book itself. On a minor issue: “a near-impenetrable veil that only three survivors could enter” could be significantly better written to create the punch that these three women are the only ones who can enter.

The main character is then introduced: Talitha Velkwood has avoided anything to do with the tragedy that took her mother and eight-year-old sister, drifting from one job to another, never settling anywhere or with anyone, feeling as trapped by her past as if she was still there in the small town she so desperately wanted to escape from.

I noticed immediately that our main character is eponymous. I was expecting this to be significant—it was not. The only reason the neighborhood is called “Velkwood” is because the Velkwoods were the first family to buy a house on the street. That doesn’t even really make sense because usually there are names given by the developers to neighborhoods like that. More than that, if the author is going to link the place to the narrator/main character, I expect that to mean something.

I also want to note that the above quote is a single sentence. So much is packed into it that doesn’t give us anything about the story. Talitha’s listlessness is only partly relevant to her characterization (although her characterization is pretty lack-luster). We are told over and over that she’s not attached to anyone or anything, but then she is given a deep and emotional attention to her eight-year-old sister. So does she or does she not have serious attachments?

Let us continue: When a new researcher tracks her down and offers to pay her to come back to enter the vicinity, Talitha claims she’s just doing it for the money. Of all the crackpot theories over the years, no one has discovered what happened the night Talitha, her estranged, former best friend Brett, and Grace, escaped their homes twenty years ago. Will she finally get the answers she’s been looking for all these years, or is this just another dead end?

Here we are introduced to the other main characters: the new researchers, Jack, and the other two survivors: Brett and Grace. Grace as an entirely irrelevant character who added nothing to the story at all. There were multiple attempts to make her relevant to the story, but they never worked. I’m not even sure if she had potential to be a more interesting character, unlike Jack, who could’ve been more interesting. His family history tied him (indirectly) to the mystery of Velkwood. But the emotional impact of the relationship and the closure of what he’s looking for is just…nothing. It falls entirely flat.

Kiste tries to make the emotional core of the book to be the relationship between Talitha and her sister Sophie but Talitha and Brett ground the book. At the same time, Brett and Talitha are competing for emotional space. The book would be so much stronger if Brett’s family relationships were not part of it. I believe Kiste was trying to give both of them reasons to be fleeing the town, but the thing that unites them is motivation enough for both them. There didn’t need to be that added element. I’m trying to talk around it to avoid spoilers, but if you’ve read the book you know what I’m talking about.

Finally, I wanted this to lean more into being literary horror—to leave a lot of the mystery unsolved. But the second half of the book focused on explaining every piece of why and how this neighborhood turned into a ghost. The metaphor was powerful enough; I didn’t want a clear cut answers. I wanted to sit in the metaphor, to let it wash over me, and to explore the nooks and crannies of this neighborhood and how they shaped Brett and Talitha.

I found this book to just be a massive missed opportunity. There were so many places where this book could’ve succeeded and been really powerful. Like I said, the metaphor the book is working with was one I loved. But nothing was taken as far as I wanted and too much was shoved into a fairly small book, stymieing the book’s possibilities.

I received a digital version of this book for free from Saga Press as part of their Saga Says crew. Thank you so much for giving me the chance to read and review!

This summary makes this book sound like a fast-paced murder mystery set in a religious back drop, when really it is an intensely personal examination of the price of faith set in a murder mystery backdrop. The Bastion used to be one of the most holy places in the universe: the site of divine revelation. Literally, all the deities and divine creatures of the world revealed themselves to humanity. For decades, humans pilgrimaged to the site or used its symbolic power to ascend their own gods. But over time the fervor (or the novelty) waned until all that was left is a crumbling ruin haunted by Scribe IV and a few humans.

The symbolism of the place serves as a perfect location for the Pope to call a conclave of as many religious leaders as possible to make his proposal: the abolition of all established religions. Scribe IV is fairly sure this is not going to go over very well with all of these religious leaders, but who is he to countermand the Pope. Unfortunately, before this compelling theological issue can be posed, the Pope is found dead. Thus enters Quin and Angel, our investigative duo, and Quin’s haunted past, which is the monkey on this book’s back, dragging the characters and the reader down into the depth of trauma only to fight our way back out as the mystery is unfurled.

The book opens with Scribe IV contemplating the sky above Bastion, trying to guess where Heaven’s Ark Station was at that moment. He knows it would be easy to find out as the station is easily tracked, but “when so many great questions had been answered—the nature of gods and angels, the shape of the universe—Scribe IV chose to find mystery wherever he could. However small. He craved wonder and the possibility that at any moment he might experience uncertainty, be surprised” (1). What is the purpose of a scribing automaton in, essentially, a monastery at the most religious site in the universe, that is crumbling into the sea? Where faith has become something that no one needs anymore? The book ends with a path to an answer: “Faith in a world where gods were proven—maybe that in itself was a mystery worth investigating. The riddle of himself, his purpose in life, and what he might become” (167). This book is about faith and mystery and how the known and the unknown hold a tender balance with each other, snapping it—fulfilling our desire for knowledge—can cause ruptures and ripples we did not expect or intend.

I was truly blown away by the nuance, grace, tenderness, and depth of this little book. In barely 170 pages, Wise is able to tackle some of the deepest and most essential mysteries of the human experience in a way that leaves you with hope—and isn’t that what faith is all about?