Catherine (alternativelytitledbooks) - so very behind!'s Reviews > We Used to Live Here

**Many thanks to Edelweiss, Atria, and Marcus Kliewer for a DRC of this book in exchange for an honest review! Now available as of 6.18!**

There is something truly fascinating about the art of stop motion animation when you view the finished product.

Sometimes it's hard to remember that at first look, everything that appears so fluid (and in movies such as the Nightmare Before Christmas, so creepy!) was once a bunch of still puppets sitting on a miniature set...who were moved one painstaking moment at a time, and that one frame of film can take hours and even DAYS of filming to get just right.

But in the case of stop motion animator turned author Marcus Kliewer, the finished product that is We Used to Live Here not only was missing this sort of eerie fluidity...but lacked the sort of cohesion to make it make any ACTUAL sense.

The premise starts off simply enough: Charlie and Eve are two house flippers who also happen to be a loving couple...and their latest find seems too good to be true. The giant house has all sorts of promise, and they can't believe their good fortune at being the lucky two who are able to snatch it up. One day, Eve is home alone when she hears a knock at the door...and it is none other than a family of former occupants, led by Thomas, who want to take a quick jaunt down memory lane and poke around his old stomping grounds. Although Eve finds this slightly off-putting, she figures they seem harmless, and even though the snow is falling, they won't stay too long...right?

Everything takes a quick and dramatic turn, however, when Thomas' daughter manages to go missing in this short amount of time...and refuses to come out. Eve begins to panic, but Thomas assures her this behavior is normal and that she will soon emerge. However, as time goes on, Eve starts to notice frightening, unexplained noises she has never experienced before...and the winter storm raging outside means that the family is seemingly here to stay. But have they brought something other than their memories with them...something unseen, mysterious...and evil? And why does everybody have such a hard time believing Eve when she reaches out for help? Why hasn't Charlie returned...or could there be a doppelganger hanging around? Can Eve figure out what the house wants from her...before she gets 'lost' for good?

I was 100% on board to jump at the chance to read an early copy of this one after a few rave reviews AND after reading the rights to this book have already been snapped up by Netflix and a movie staring Blake Lively is in the works. A good creepy house tale is the sort of horror I can usually jump into quickly, with a few recent examples (like Sager's The Only One Left and the Due's eerie The Reformatory) coming instantly to mind. A well-written house with a vendetta normally screams Halloween BUT at the same time, seemed like a welcome break from the standard fare of summer thriller season, so I was chomping at the bit to dive into this tale.

But to be honest...I think I sort of tripped on the doormat and never quite recovered.

Finding out this story STARTED as a series on Reddit makes a whole lot of sense: it has a certain disjointed, piecemeal feeling that may read foreboding to some, but just left me unsettled and sort of confused for the entire read. There are random bits of news clippings, interviews, home listings, and the like sprinkled throughout the book which is normally a device I LOVE because I honestly find nothing more enticing in a horror story than some solid backstory, but let's just say you can't go into this book expecting ANYTHING to be fully explained...at all.

Some readers will LOVE this (and have, evidenced by so many early 5 star reviews!) and there are certain aspects I enjoyed too: the atmosphere was foreboding, there was a mystery afoot almost immediately (although you're going to have to parse out exactly what that mystery IS in your mind!) and there is plenty of fodder for creepiness, speculation, and a slow build to a crescendo of craziness. I'm not so much a fan of a slow burn, however, so I kept wanting to SEE this book rather than reading it: the novel almost reads more like a screenplay at times, or like one that was first imagined in a visual sense and THEN translated to the page.

I can't tell you how many times I've watched a movie with a twisty ending and then thought...NOW I need a second watch to catch all of the details I missed the first time, and this is absolutely THAT in bookish form. This is no disrespect to Kliewer as a writer: in fact, it's sort of a compliment in that he could add so much extraneous detail that seems important but isn't easy to piece together from the off. At the same time, though, as much as I had a thousand questions upon finishing...I really had no desire to tromp through it again. The sort of unhinged nature of the last 20% was enough to make up for earlier inconsistencies...or at the least, enough to convince me I NEED to watch the Netflix adaptation to see if this was simply a case of right story, wrong medium.

But if it turns out that Blake Lively can't save it?💃

... I'm not sure anyone can.

3 stars