Cassie's Reviews > We Used to Live Here

I've been reading Stephen King since I was nine years old. Horror is my favorite genre, and I watch scary movies to relax. I'm not easy to scare. And We Used to Live Here terrified me. I would have read it in one day, except that I wasn't brave enough to read it at night.

Don't let that domestic drama-ish cover mislead you: This book is pure cosmic horror. It centers on a young couple, Eve and Charlie, who have recently purchased an isolated, ramshackle home deep in the Oregon wilderness with the intention of flipping it. One night, a few weeks after they move in, Eve is waiting for Charlie to get home when there's a knock at the door. It's a perfectly harmless-looking family -- two parents, three children -- and the father says he grew up in the house, and would Eve mind terribly if he brought his family in to look around? Just for 15 minutes?

Even that brief summary sounds like the beginning of a domestic suspense novel, but trust me when I say that We Used to Live Here veers in completely unexpected, mind-bending directions. From the very first page, the atmosphere feels menacing and ominous, laced with a mounting sense of unease that quickly becomes all-out dread. The scene in the attic in particular was relayed so vividly, with so much tension and malignancy, that I could literally feel my heart racing. And the unease, the sense of wrongness, I felt during the scene in the neighbor's house...It still makes me shudder. This book is scary.

I actually found We Used to Live Here even scarier for the lack of explanation it provides; there's a lot left to interpretation, a lot that isn't overtly explained in the book's conclusion. That's not going to please every reader, but often the most frightening and unsettling things are the ones we can't explain -- just like many of the rooted-in-reality topics that Marcus Kliewer incorporates into the plot: the Mandela effect, doppelgängers, sleep paralysis demons. I think Kliewer gave us enough to fill in the blanks ourselves -- and there is even a hidden message embedded in the book that provides an additional nugget of information (read and observe closely!).

We Used to Live Here was a completely gripping, truly unsettling, and often downright horrifying reading experience for me. I see you, Marcus Kliewer, and I can't wait for more. Thank you to Atria/Emily Bestler Books for the early reading opportunity.