What To Read

Tertulia's First Dibs Editors Salon series is an exclusive look at a few of the most exciting books coming out each season. Join us on September 17 at 7:30pm on Zoom for what promises to be a great conversation about books by the editors who helped to shape and publish them.

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One of our fall picks is Model Home by Rivers Solomon, which we guarantee is not like any haunted house story you've heard about before. We are honored to have the book's acquiring editor, Sean McDonald, join us at the salon on September 17 to talk about the book. He shared this personal note about the book as a special preview just for Tertulia readers.

Sean McDonald is Publisher of MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux and the Co-Publisher (with Questlove) of their AUWA imprint.

Rivers Solomon writing a haunted house book strikes me as one of the very best concoctions contemporary literature could offer.

(I didn’t come up with the idea, so I’m not bragging—but I do get to publish it, which I am bragging about, constantly.) Rivers, I think, has a brilliant spooky mind—spooky smart, spooky provocative, spooky unexpected. All of which sounds like exactly what you want from a haunted house story. When I learned that the haunted house in question would be a “model home’ in a gated community in suburban Dallas, a house that’s tormenting and maybe even murdering its residents, the first Black family to live in the Oak Creek Estates, I entered into the always-embarrassing, desperate gimme gimme gimme mode—this I had to read right away.

And then, at last, the manuscript landed. And I should have known. This was, after all, the writer who had written my favorite blisteringly strong lead character in recent memory in Sorrowland—Vern, a woman who mysteriously sprouts a dramatic exoskeleton part way through the book. The writer who had reinvented the mermaid story in The Deep—a novel written in collaboration with Daveed Diggs and the hip hop group Clipping—as a dark fantasy about merfolk as the descendents of pregnant African women thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. The writer whose debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, had instantly earned its author the sobriquet as the successor to Octavia Butler we’ve been waiting for (and was just anointed one of Esquire’s best science fiction books ever.)

Model Home, in short, was going to explode every idea I’d ever had about haunted house books (and I’d had a few, at least since publishing John Darnielle’s Devil House a few years back).

The mind-blowing began with the main character, Ezri, the wild and conflicted and maybe not super trustworthy narrator who had moved as far away from the family home as possible, only to be pulled all the way back to Dallas when their parents stop responding to phone calls and texts. Ezri is in every way a worthy successor to Vern (though I suspect Vern would beat them in a fight), their voice electric and mesmerizing. And here are Ezri’s sisters, Eve and Emmannuelle, both special forces in their own rights, and Ezri’s teen daughter, Elijah, new to this family maelstrom. And in that stll-stifling gated community, the house itself still stands, 677 Acacia Drive, a house still occupied by, at least, their mother’s fearsome spirit—but many other purely malevolent forces besides.

Here it all is: race, history, family, identity, secrets…of course it’s scary as all get-out. But it’s a lot more than that, too. There is darkness, and then there is darkness. Model Home has lots of both, and a few legit jump scares, too. It will, I promise, haunt you.