We Came to Welcome You: A Novel of Suburban Horror is the latest in a long and fine tradition of using American suburbia as a metaphor for conformity, control, and abject terror hiding behind dead plastic smiles.

The novel hits the tropes quite well in its opening chapters: the eerily identical houses, the off-kilter welcoming committee, and the robot-like children. It even tosses in a couple of tantalizing genre threads in the form of a possibly haunted house (complete with an ancient tree in the backyard), and the classic creepy little girl in a dress who keeps showing up at the worst possible times.

Vincent Tirado does a great job of using these tried-and-true horror concepts in a way that doesn’t feel rote or forced. The connections between these elements eventually do come together, but it’s a very slow and intriguing burn.

There’s another story going on in We Came to Welcome You, though. The plot unfolds through the eyes of Sol, who isn’t in the best frame of mind at the beginning of the book. Her research job is kind of in limbo when she and her wife move into Maneless Grove.

She’s already in therapy—presumably for her depression and paranoia—but she’s currently in between therapists. She also has an alcohol abuse problem that is becoming more and more of a concern to her wife, Alice.

In fact, Sol is just not a nice person in general. She assumes the worst in people and has plenty of disdain in reserve for anyone who might have a negative reaction to her being gay, Black, Latina, or any combination of the three. She’s a walking identity landmine with an added dash of instability brought about by her Catholic upbringing, and her shields are up all of the time.

It’s interesting to see a story through the eyes of a very flawed and seemingly very damaged individual, but it’s frustrating as well.

It’s hard to determine if Vincent Tirado intended for the character to be so hateful and prejudiced to serve as a contrast to the phony smiles and sickeningly sweet niceness of their Maneless Grove neighbors—the differentiation of the outsider versus the joiners works, but Sol’s point of view is presented so objectively that some of her anger and bitterness can read like universal truths.

The worst part of this is that in spite of the clever idea that drives the mystery, Sol herself has no arc at all. She is different at the end of the story, but through a rushed deus ex machina more than any kind of development that the reader witnesses. It can be argued that she undergoes no change at all, and that some of her traits just get amplified.

There’s something poetic in how Sol’s individuality helps her deal with the neighborhood’s dark secret, but honestly, Sol herself just makes it hard to care about any of it.

The juxtaposition of the effect of society’s real horrors with the supernatural is an intriguing one, but it doesn’t fully come together in We Came to Welcome You. Both facets are weakened by the other. If you do decide to read this, be warned: the premise is much more interesting than the book itself.