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Ezri Maxwell grew up with two sisters, Eve and Emmanuelle, in a house at 677 Acacia Drive, in a gated and overwhelmingly white community outside Dallas. The Maxwells were the only Black family there. The house frightened the children with things nobody else would believe, and Ezri, the eldest, usually took the blame.

Ezri left for Oxford and built a life abroad, cut off from their parents for almost twenty years. Then a set of alarming texts arrives, apparently from their mother. Ezri flies back and joins Eve and Emmanuelle at the old address, where both parents are dead.

The police rule it a murder-suicide. The siblings do not agree with one another about what happened. One question divides them: whether the house itself, or something living inside it, is to blame.

This is a haunted-house horror novel that points the genre at racism, assimilation and the question of who gets to belong. It is unsettling and emotionally raw, built around family and memory, and it looks at what the pursuit of the American dream costs in a place designed to shut people out. The New York Times named it one of the year's best horror books.