Model Home - A Highfalutin Haunted House

Model Home by Rivers Solomon was recommended to me by a friend sometime last year, after I’d mentioned having an interest in architecture horror—things in the vein of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, the indie horror game Anatomy by Kitty Horrorshow, and the movie You Should Have Left (2020) with Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried. My friend, having neither read the book itself nor heard of those other things I’ve listed, thought Model Home might fit that bill. 

It doesn’t, really. Instead, this novel is undeniably a haunted house story, written with a deep understanding of the subgenre, bordering on metatextual. I understand the confusion; architecture horror and the haunted house genre are both forms of media with a spooky building at their heart, and are closely related. But while architecture horror is about impossible structures, places where the walls themselves are the monster, the haunted house is centered around human emotion. In Model Home, the house is incidental. The Maxwell family, like many other families in the genre, are what is really haunted.

Synopsis

The Maxwell siblings return to their childhood home, 677 Acacia Drive, after their mother and father’s apparent suicides. Emmanuelle, the youngest, is convinced it was the house that killed them; she has vivid memories of the woman without a face, the ghost that terrorized them when they were kids. Eve, the middle sister, is more concerned with handling their parents’ affairs. Ezri, the eldest sibling, protagonist and primary victim of the woman without a face, is unstable, overcome with grief and terror at seeing the home again. 

The narrative goes back and forth in time, between Ezri’s unaccountable (and unreliable, even in their own opinion) recollection of childhood in 677, and the Maxwell siblings today, with careers and children of their own, coping with this sudden and horrible intrusion on their lives they’ve tried to build for themselves. 

Characters

Ezri and their daughter Elijah are like a reflection and a forecast: queer black youth and queer black adulthood, parenthood, both the hope for a better future and an example of history repeating itself. A child of the internet age, all humanity’s knowledge at her finger tips, but still deeply unwise, Elijah is such a perfect study of what it's been like to be a queer, black adolescent in the last decade. Reading from their perspectives (Elijah is followed in a few third person chapters throughout the novel) felt wildly authentic. 

Ezri’s trauma is deeply grounded in shame: shame about their body, about being intersex, and their resulting “gender-confusion,” as their sister Eve once put it; shame about violence they may or may not have committed, against pets and their sisters; and shame about the woman without a face, because if she was real, Ezri’s inherent wrongness must be what brought her upon their family. 

The only thing that felt inauthentic was Ezri’s anger. Their interiority was excellent, relatable, and complex, but the way their personality manifests on the outside, mostly in screaming matches with Eve, felt out of step. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe this is emblematic of the character’s dissociative tendencies, of Ezri’s disconnected relationship with selfhood—but still, I found it to be the weakest aspect of their character.

Eve was the least engaging sibling. That isn’t to say she was not engaging at all, and I can sort of see why she was necessary to the narrative. In the early chapters, when I couldn’t really tell the sisters apart, Eve was the first one to define herself by being Ezri’s rock and an exemplar of success, but Emmanuel left a much more lasting impression for the way she was affected by the haunting, and affects the plot in turn. 

Haints and The Haunted House

Emanuelle believes 677 is specifically being haunted by a haint. Haints are closely associated with the mixed and diasporic spirituality of black Americans, hailing from the Gulluh Geechee culture. They are more like poltergeists than regular ghosts, embodying a malicious energy that sometimes comes from restless spirits with unfinished business. Emmanuelle’s belief in this particular creature is emblematic of the siblings’ upbringing, which was not just shrouded in fear of the supernatural, but also fear of their mother Eudora, who expected her children to be high-achieving paragons of black excellence. They were raised to be educated, keenly aware of black history and the way it affects every part of their lives, but still deliberately surrounded by whiteness, always competing with it, defining themselves in opposition to it. The Maxwells are, by the original definition of the word, “woke” to a fault.

For all my talk of genre and metatextuality, the haunted house element is relatively paint-by-numbers. The manifestation of trauma as supernatural phenomena is very explicit, and not very genre-bending. All the predictable staples are present: children harming animals, harming each other, collecting mysterious, impossible injuries; a harried, emotionally complex mother trying desperately to keep her family in order. 

It’s better to think of Model House as an exceptional character study and fictionalized analysis of gender, race, and the supernatural, with the haunted house being a straightforward vehicle for said analysis. I feel like Solomon took a very clinical approach to the tropes. In some ways it feels like an essay in prose, which is exactly my jam, but may not be for everyone.