Despite us being firmly being into December, I still have a few horror books on my to-read list that I am working through, and We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer came up on my library holds list. I listened to the audiobook, as I enjoy being able to yell at characters in a good haunted house book for their choices in real time. However, as the story progressed, it seemed to me like it was trying to be too many things for my taste, and in consequence only halfway succeeding at them. But it did deliver spooks galore, eerie atmosphere, and a very large, very creepy house.
Charlie and Eve are millennial house flippers who have committed the rookie mistake of thinking they can flip a huge, old house without losing their shirts. (Seriously, who are you flipping this to? How do you think you can do all the work needed on that kind of old house and make a profit? But I guess someone has to keep the old haunted house market going.) One night while Charlie is down the mountain in town, Eve hears a knock on the door. A family is there, and the father says that he grew up in the house, and wouldn’t it be nice if he could show the place to his kids. Eve has severe anxiety and is a people pleaser, and lets them in because she can’t bring herself to say no. What is supposed to be a quick 15 minute tour turns into more as the daughter immediately starts acting strange, leading to an ever more bizarre series of events as Eve finds her life and her entire world gradually turned upside down.
This book started out strong for me, because I do love a book about a creepy house, but several things ended up slowly unraveling for me, including Charlie and Eve’s relationship. Initially I was excited—queer lady house flippers, how fun! But I soon began to wonder how their relationship even worked. There was an attempt to show their backstory and how they got together, but by the time the book opened I had to wonder “do you even still like each other?” Eve was anxious and nervy—to the point where I would be hard-pressed to even remember anything else about her. And Charlie is both oddly uncaring about Eve being anxious and pretty aggressive and brusque as a person. It seemed odd to me that they would stay together, much less be successful house flippers together. As a result, Charlie seemed more like a side note and than one half of the main couple, and her off page time was less concerning to me and more just a beat to tick off the list.
The book was also sort of a mess in my opinion, although I have had heard all sorts of good reviews, so this is my personal preference and your mileage may vary. Very obviously, this book is riffing off of House of Leaves with its creepy, indefinable house and found documentation framing. But it’s also trying to be a ghost story and perhaps a haunted forest/mountain/spot on the map. Now, I am the last person to say that every detail must be nailed down and resolved in my horror reading, and I find part of the fun in starting out in a new horror story is figuring out exactly what sort of spooky story you’re reading. But for me, part of the fun is the slow wind up as you figure it out and are waiting for the ax to drop for the characters. We Used To Live Here continually kept changing the rules and tropes it was engaging with, and in doing so, it left me more confused and bewildered than scared. Eve also displayed a level of decision making that was catastrophically bad even by horror novel standards, and by the end had started to sour my suspension of disbelief. I didn’t want We Used To Live Here to resolve every beat, but I would have liked it to resolve a least a little more.
In conclusion, I went into We Used to Live Here with high hopes, and while it was definitely a wild ride, it was perhaps not the journey that I wanted. However, as I said, I have heard tons of good opinions on this book, so I think this is a polarizing book, and it may be right up your alley. If you are a huge House of Leaves fan, or a fan of the bizarre, I suspect you will get more out of this book than I did.
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