In the summer of 2024, Vancouver-based writer Marcus Kliewer received a lot of coverage for his debut novel. Initially published in a different, abbreviated form on the r/nosleep subreddit, where it was an audience favourite, We Used to Live Here was read by a film producer (who became Kliewer’s manager) and film rights were snapped up before the book was even submitted to publishers. Kliewer hadn’t even completed the manuscript when the novel was sold as part of a three-book deal. It’s the horror fiction version of a Cinderella story.

Somewhat overlooked in all that media coverage, however, was just how good We Used to Live Here was. An intimate, small-cast piece set largely in a remote house with connections to an unspeakable cosmic force, We Used to Live Here was a powerful piece of horror writing.

Kliewer’s second novel, The Caretaker, is even better.

The premise is straightforward: mid-twenties Macy Mullins takes a job as a weekend caretaker at a secluded house outside a small town almost two hours from her home in Salem, Oregon. Her employer, a recent widow, is cryptic about the job itself.

On a videotape, though, the deceased homeowner, David Carnswel (who readers have already encountered in the prologue), outlines Macy’s responsibilities, which are “simple at face value, but it’s crucial you don’t mess them up.” Those responsibilities begin with the lights:

Make sure you keep all the main- and second-floor lights off between three and four a.m. That’s it. That’s all. Don’t worry about the basement lights. And if you have to use the facilities and can’t see in the dark, feel free to switch on a light or two, that’s fine, just don’t let any of them stay on for more than three minutes at a time. Not one second over three minutes. Be vigilant. The lights have a nasty habit of turning on by themselves.

These aren’t just tasks; Carnswel refers to them as rites, “necessary precautions in regards to suppressing the entity.”

Suffice it to say, Macy comes to understand just how significant those rites are, and the costs of failure.

With The Caretaker, Kliewer hits harder by tightening his focus – while We Used to Live Here was a chamber piece, The Caretaker is virtually a one-woman show, a powerful solo performance by Macy Mullins.

The story is told using a direct, immediate first-person point of view, immersing the reader in Macy’s responses to both the events of the story and the forces that have brought her to this point. What begins, seemingly, as a charmingly wry, world-weary, snarky Gen Z voice, rich with pop culture references and snide observations, slowly, inexorably, begins to reveal the truth about Macy, truths that she cannot, will not, fully face.

Barely surviving in the wake of her father’s death, Macy lives in a rundown hotel room with her younger sister, Jemma, a compulsive shoplifter. They’ve just received an eviction notice; there’s no money, no one is hiring, and the pay for the caretaking gig is too high to resist, despite all the warning signs. The circumstances are much more than a way to avoid the idiot plot – the moment in much horror when the reader/audience asks, “Why don’t they just leave the obviously haunted house?” They reveal Macy’s character; the reasons why she can’t leave are numerous.

It’s not just class and the economy, though. The Caretaker, as the author’s note affirms, is steeped in the horrors of Macy’s grief and what may be incipient mental illness. Macy, we learn – directly and viscerally – is not so much wry and world weary as she is in agony, and genuinely weary, her ongoing suffering subsumed by her need to care for her sister and, through her new job, to protect the world from “something far worse than the most horrific imaginings of hell.” As the hours pass, and Macy is faced with obstacle after obstacle, we witness first-hand the cost of her failures, and their effect on her fragile psyche. The reader cannot help but feel deep empathy for this vulnerable young woman, which makes the horror and the fear that much more immediate.

There are, admittedly, a few moments of clunky exposition early in the novel as Kliewer establishes Macy and her voice, but The Caretaker quickly finds its stride. It’s a thrilling, immersive, devastating, and genuinely horrifying read.