NZLisaM's Reviews > We Used to Live Here

The author has a creative imagination, but I wasn’t sold on the way it was written!

Eve Palmer, and her partner Charlie Bastion fix up old houses with the intention of flipping them for a profit, and their current home – 3709 Heritage Lane – in the backcountry of Oregon is their most ambitious project to date. One Friday night, Eve and their dog Shylo (no harm comes to the dog btw) are alone in the house, waiting on Charlie’s return, when the doorbell sounds.

Eve reluctantly opens the door to a family of five – Thomas, his wife Paige, and their children, Kai, Newton, and Jenny. Turns out Thomas grew up in the house, and since they were passing, he was hoping to show his family the interior. They seem harmless, so Eve agrees. But the tour stretches on forever, and finally just when they’re about to leave, Jenny, their youngest, goes missing… And that’s just the start of the bizarreness…

Unhinged and mind-bending! I savoured the idea of this, the concept, the cleverly concealed clues and hints, the insertion of news articles, interviews, relevant articles, etc, the gothic setting, and best of all, the chilled-me-to-my-bone ending, and the place it ended. However, the way it was written just didn’t do it for me – it was all over the show – choppy, hard-to-keep-track of plot, some downright awful dialogue, and inconsistent character behaviour. I appreciate that given the trippy and strange plot, the writing needed to contain a certain amount of surrealism especially the further into the novel things got, but it was this way from the beginning, which made it hard to connect with any characters as they were all odd from the first meeting, therefore tough to care about. For me the most terrifying part of a horror novel is when your characters are living their lives as if everything is normal, only to be confronted with something supernatural or paranormal, and it would’ve worked with this exact plot and not lost anything. I’ve seen a similar plot work in a TV show, and another book, and the characters were 100% more realistic to life – can’t name either obviously due to spoilers.

It will be interesting to see if the Netflix movie will get it right (by me).

P.S. The title is all kinds of awesome.