Rivers Solomon’s Model Home is a fresh addition to the haunted house genre – a category that over the past several decades, in its resort to irony, parody and pastiche, has shown signs of terminal exhaustion. How many movies have referenced the hallway rivers of blood in The Shining? How many updated retellings must we endure of The Fall of the House of Usher, or Rebecca, or The Haunting of Hill House? What is possible, now, beyond the recycling of tired tropes? Solomon’s novel is an imperfectly triumphant answer, even as it reworks the haunted house story to beat them all, the ghost story in which there are no ghosts, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.
Following the violent deaths of their parents, three siblings converge on their childhood home in an affluent quarter of Dallas. The house is a place of dread and trauma for Emmanuelle, Eve and especially to Ezri, the gender-fluid narrator, who has flown home from England with their daughter to help arrange the parents’ funeral and resolve their financial affairs. It is the siblings’ shared belief that this is not a murder-suicide; it is the house itself that killed their parents – just as in their childhood it is the house that caused their constant headaches, their waking up in strange places, the killing of their pets, and the scarring of Emmanuelle with sulphuric acid in the bath. As the only black family in a gated community, they were superficially welcomed by the neighbourhood yet isolated from it.
Each unhappy family, Tolstoy says, is unhappy in its own way, and Solomon is particularly good at showing the tensions between family members, the rivalries and frictions, jealousies and repressed anger – an intensity of feeling that is also love.
Ezri is an unreliable narrator, made more unreliable by a dissociative disorder perhaps caused by childhood abuse. Occasionally the narrative perspective shifts from Ezri to their 14-year-old daughter Elijah, which contributes to the sense of identity as something dynamic and amorphous rather than stable and constant. Emmanuelle, Eve and Ezri are sharply distinguished characters and often antagonistic towards each other, but also often come together as one – entangled, united and intuitive of each other’s feelings.
The novel ends in a climax of revelation that is surprising and satisfying in a Get Out fashion, but also a change of mode – there is some lightly disguised exposition in the dénouement of a kind that Henry James would never have permitted himself. In The Turn of the Screw, James pulls the rug out in such a way that it increases the horror of his tale – that it is not the malevolent ghosts of dead servants but rather the fiercely protective governess who poses a threat to the children in her care dawns on the reader as a terrifying possibility, and there the story ends. In Model House, Solomon ties the narrative threads off neatly – too neatly, and then adds a superfluous final chapter in what is otherwise a suspenseful and superbly written novel.
Model Home, by Rivers Solomon (Merky Books, $54 hb), is out now.
