Stores are stocked with fall and Halloween decor, and that means spooky reading season is here. It’s the perfect time to cozy up with a scary story, and Marcus Kliewer’s debut novel, “We Used to Live Here,” does the trick.
Kliewer’s novel began life as a serialized short story on Reddit, where it won the Scariest Story of 2021 award on the NoSleep forum. It took a nontraditional route into publication, with Netflix acquiring film rights for an original movie starring Blake Lively, and then Simon & Schuster snapping it up for U.S. publication.
And who could blame them? Kliewer’s novel has one of the best and creepiest premises you’ve ever heard: A young couple, Eve and Charlie, get a great deal on an old house in a remote but picturesque area. As they’re working on the house one day, there’s a knock at the door, and it’s a man with his wife and two children. He says he lived in the house a few years earlier, and asks if it would be OK to show his kids around. Anyone who has ever been curious to revisit their childhood home can totally identify, right?
And since this is a horror novel, you can also predict the creepy possibilities. As soon as the strangers enter the home, weird things start happening. A child goes missing. Rooms appear altered. A storm rolls in. Charlie takes off unexpectedly. And Eve starts to lose her grip on reality … Or does she?
“We Used to Live Here” is a twisty haunted house tale with nods to Shirley Jackson and Jordan Peele. Between each chapter, the author cleverly employs maps and other documents with Reddit-style evidence of something nefarious happening inside the house. The result is a can’t-look-away novel that makes for a frighteningly good read.
