We Used To Live Here by Marcus Kliewer

I would like to thank Bantam and Random Things Tours for an advance copy of this movel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Bantam

Published – Out Now

Price – £18.99 hardback £5.99 Kindle eBook

You let them back in.
You shouldn't have...

Young couple Charlie and Eve can’t believe the killer deal they got on an old house in a beautiful yet remote neighbourhood nestled deep in the mountains. One day, there’s a knock at the door. A man stands there with his family, claiming to have lived there years before and asking if it would be alright if he showed his kids around. People pleaser to a fault, Eve lets them in.

As soon as the family enters their home, strange things start to happen, and Eve wants nothing more than for them to leave and never come back. But they can’t – or won’t – take the hint that they are no longer welcome.

Then Charlie suddenly vanishes, and Eve begins to lose her grip on reality. She’s convinced there’s something terribly wrong with the house and its past inhabitants . . . or is it all in her head?

Ultimately, I think horror is about having reality in some way disrupted in an unexpected way. It can be finding our loved ones are not who we thought they are, or it can be supernatural forces tearing our lives and souls apart. When life gets out of our control that is when horror gets experienced. In Marcus Kliewer’s excellent horror novel We Used To Live Here we have a story of a young couple’s life being entirely changed in a matter of days with an impressive way of using storytelling to immerse us in the action and made one of the most creepy reads of the year.

Eve and her girlfriend Charlie have spent a few years flipping homes to make a living but a financial downturn in circumstances have leads them to an old house in the middle of nowhere. Eve is at home when a middle-aged couple and their three young children arrive at the door. Thomas explains that he used to live in the house as a child and as the family were passing could they have a look around for old time’s sake. Eve reluctantly agrees but this sets in motion a terrifying series of events.

I’m hugely impressed how disturbing a reading experience this was. Kliewer works hard initially to make us understand Eve – an emotionally vulnerable person aware her constant anxiety can lead her to worst case scenarios very quickly and so against her better nature she thinks a quick 15-minute walk around can’t hurt anyone. We the readers will be shouting no but we won’t be prepared for the strangeness that is about to follow. Thomas and family’s visit gets longer and longer they interact with Charlie and this section of the story preys on the idea of your home soon not being your own quite viscerally and tensions rise not just with people staying unexpectedly in your home but strange creepy children and a woman passing judgement on Eve and Charlie’s lifestyle choices to be a loving couple. Here there is the more domestic horror that people can inflict on other people. It is very effective, the kind of start to a weird crime story you may read on the news, but only just the start of where this book is going.

The bigger element is that the family’s arrival starts to trigger something much more powerfully supernatural to start work. The house and world seem to be changing. Here the power of a novel to effect the change comes across ingeniously. Kliewer in terms of writing can bring out the uncanny valleyness of characters who may suddenly stop in their tracks; a game of hide and seek is turned several times into something menacing. I loved the way stillness and sudden motion come across in the story and yes you do suddenly get that tight feeling of something bad is going to happen. What I think makes that work further is we too as readers get involved as we spot things changing from chapter to chapter as does Eve. Is that our own reader memories failing us or do we become suddenly more aware than Eve that things are not as you’d expect anymore? Its insidious but the effect builds and builds that everything gets stranger and more nightmarish as Eve finds her world changing faster and faster.

Interspersed in the chapters are little snippets of some form of evidence dossier. Newspaper stories, psychology journals and more ominously various online conspiracy sources detailing something known as the Old House theory. Initially appearing random cuttings, we start to see parallels with Eve’s story which makes us get an even worse feeling of what is going on and it also adds a touch of the cosmic horror that some immense strange force can at random choose someone to simply make their life hell for purposes no one can understand. Again, we as readers get involved putting the pieces together that Eve is never going to be aware of – we manage to be with Eve both inside the trap but now we also recognise the shape of it and that makes it even more scary a read.

Safe to say We Used To Live Here is a stunning horror story to read. Its use of playing with reality, the steady build up of weirdness and the way the story adds more depth and history to make it feel a much bigger tale of supernatural forces at work make it really stand out. Settle down, prepare to get engrossed and I really hope no one knocks at the door when you’re reading this. It is very strongly recommended!