WE CAME TO WELCOME YOU

A contemporary take on suburban horror.

Marisol Reyes is a Black woman, the child of Dominican immigrants. Her wife, Alice Song, is Korean American. When they buy a home in a gated community, they quickly discover that their sexuality and their ethnicity set them apart from their neighbors. Sol has no interest in fitting in. Alice, though, feels a need to become a part of Maneless Grove. As this couple tries to navigate their differences, the homeowners association becomes a relentless presence. With each passing day, joining the HOA seems both more inevitable and more like signing a compact with the devil. This is all great stuff. Tirado is clearly riffing on horror classics like The Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s Baby, as well as the movie Get Out (which is itself a riff on the aforementioned horror classics). But the author does not deliver on the promise of this setup. Very little in the novel makes sense, and Sol is more frustrating than compelling. She’s on leave from her job as a professor at Yale while her department investigates a plagiarism claim. This makes her vulnerable, for sure, as does her increasing reliance on alcohol and what looks like clinical depression. But Sol watches her house murder the only other Black woman in Maneless Grove, hears voices in her head (including the voice of that murdered Black woman), sees a vision of dead neighbors rotting in their living room, digs up her backyard to find a diary describing freaky stuff going on in her neighborhood generally and in her house specifically, and cuts live roots out of her feet without deciding that maybe it’s time to get out of Maneless Grove. Also? There’s some stuff about a regional cult back in the day that goes…nowhere. If this seems like a lot, it is, and none of it adds up in any sort of satisfying way.

Great premise, bummer execution.