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"My life is a dark woods with a slasher in the midst," says Ezri Washington Maxwell, the protagonist of this eerie horror novel from Solomon (Sorrowland). Ezri, a highly educated, Black, autistic, intersex single parent, grew up in a predominantly white Texas suburb. Though they have doggedly tried to escape their background, they and their two sisters are forced by the deaths of their parents to reconvene in the family home in a classic haunted house setup. The substance of the horror stems from Ezri grappling with the recall of innumerable tortured moments spent within its walls. The first half of the book is stellar in its evocation of Ezri's emotional suffocation, past and present. Midway through, however, Ezri latches on to the image of themselves as the tormented child in the Ursula K. LeGuin story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," a literary reference that feels somewhat clunky. Meanwhile the intricate, shadowed layers of memory they have laboriously delineated shrivel in the spotlighting of a barely sketched villain. The consequences of evil are as multifaceted and sharp as shattered crystal, while evildoers are sledgehammers without nuance. This may be true enough in life, but it's a bit of a letdown in fiction. Still, the dazzling atmospherics and sharp-toothed point about race in America will draw readers in. Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Co. (Oct.)