What’s the book? We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer
How dark is it? Dark grey. Or is it sky blue? I could swear it was a different color last time I looked . . .
How good is it? 8/10 cryptic ciphers
This one was a nailbiter. I was fully invested from the beginning, excited even when the book made me learn Morse code and painstakingly type Norwegian phrases into Google translate. It singlehandedly restored my faith in the annoying device of interspersing minichapters of newsclips and police reports between stretches of narrative. Quite a feat for a story that spends so much time being aggressively normal.
Eve and her partner Charlie are fixing up a house, hoping to flip it. It’s more of a wreck than they’d first thought but it was a great deal and once they’re done it would make a great vacation home or rental property, surrounded by beautiful forest at the end of a winding little mountain lane.
It’s a Friday night and Eve is waiting for Charlie to get home with groceries and wine for a cozy night in when a family knocks on the door. Father, mother, three kids, all very clean cut and well dressed and sheepish as they ask for a look around. Thomas, the father, lived here as a kid and he’d really like to show his kids where he grew up. They’ll be fast, they promise.
As soon as they step through the door, everything slowly starts to get weird. The thing is, the weirdness is so fleeting at first, such tiny moments in an otherwise normal chain of events, it’s easy for Eve to think she’s just being paranoid. After all, she does have massive anxiety problems. She is prone to catastrophizing and getting caught in anxiety spirals. Charlie isn’t phased by any of it. It’s probably all just in Eve’s head. Sure, the basement is surprisingly full of mazelike corridors, but it’s an old house with a lot of DIY renovations. Sure, the attic is creepy, but what attic isn’t? Sure, Thomas had that weird moment out in the yard but he seems normal enough now . . .
By the time Eve decides it’s not just her, there’s definitely something creepy happening and even if she is just going crazy she wants this family gone and honestly, they should probably just abandon the house and get out of town altogether, it’s way too late. Eve’s neck deep in this twisted new reality and can’t seem to find a way out.
This book does have some gore at the end but most of the horror is of the mindbending altered reality type. The buildup is admirably slow and suspenseful and even as we get to the end, it’s hard to tell what exactly is going on and why, mostly because we’re tied to Eve’s perspective and she has very little chance to puzzle any of it out as she tries to claw her way back to her old life, her simple life before this family darkened her doorstep.
The minichapters are highly effective at enhancing the suspense and weirdness. Often, this kind of interleaving is made up of “documents” that bear directly on the mystery unfolding but in this book, they’re mostly snippets of other weird time slips and stories of other people waking up to find reality had changed around them. A kid explores a haunted house on a dare from friends and walks out to find that none of those friends exist anymore. An old house in the Pacific Northwest is inexplicably surrounded by plants native to other parts of the world. Someone looks for an off-brand monkey toy only to be told that toy and that company never existed, it’s just an internet hoax, but this exact monkey was Eve’s favorite toy as a child. Whaaaaat? These little snippets are our only clues to the big picture and they are maddeningly vague and incomplete. And occasionally in Morse code or Norwegian. I loved it.
To be fair, none of that larger mystery wraps up nicely at all. It’s got a very creepypasta dream logic vibe to it that can be maddeningly random for some people. I might be uniquely creeped out by well done dream logic–it’s one of the only things that genuinely freaks me out so this is the first book that’s spooked me in a long time.
If you like your horror straightforward and full of blood, this will be disappointing for you. If you’re in it for slow burns and deep character development this might also be disappointing for you. But if you like little puzzles that make you question reality, I highly recommend this one. It was a lot of fun.
Darker Books 