Home Is Where the Horror Is

After a brief bout with an aggressive cancer, Eleanor Fan’s mother, Lele, has died. The two had been inseparable, with the former working as a therapist and the latter managing many of her daughter’s professional and personal affairs. Upended by the loss of such a vital force in her life, Eleanor is determined to fulfill her mother’s last wish: to use her modest inheritance to buy her first home.

After being outbid on a series of questionable houses she can barely afford, Eleanor is taken to a stunning model home in a cleared valley, “the ground scraped clean of the ancient trees and everything that had sheltered within, sterile as salted earth.” Built on “a vast trapezoid of razed land,” it has coveted eleven-foot ceilings and floors of polished concrete and engineered hardwood. There is only one other vacant residence nearby; Eleanor is told that the proposed community’s original developer has gone bankrupt and that a new one will be resuming construction the...