Model Home
by Rivers Solomon
Narrated by Gabby Beans
Why You'll Love This
Gabby Beans makes a haunted childhood feel like something you survived too.
- Great if you want: literary horror rooted in Blackness, grief, and family fracture
- Listening experience: slow, atmospheric, and emotionally disorienting — more dread than jump scares
- Narration: Beans brings quiet intensity; her restraint amplifies the horror
- Skip if: you need plot momentum or clear supernatural resolution
About This Book
The Maxwell siblings have spent their adult lives staying away from the Dallas subdivision where they grew up — the only Black family in a gated enclave where strange, terrible things began happening as soon as they moved in. When their parents die, Ezri returns with her sisters Eve and Emanuelle to close the house and reckon with a childhood they have never discussed honestly with each other. Rivers Solomon inverts the haunted house formula, turning it toward questions of race, family silence, and the cost of staying in places that were never meant for you.
Gabby Beans narrates with the emotional precision this psychologically dense novel demands — the siblings' distinct voices, their specific ways of having survived the same house, require a narrator capable of holding multiple registers simultaneously. Locus Award winner for Horror in 2025. At just under nine hours, Model Home is a compact and unsettling novel that uses genre conventions in the service of something larger.