‘We Used To Live Here’ – Marcus Kliewer (Penguin Books)

 


Page Count: 368 Pages

My ‘kind of’ resolution to read more books that I already own, and as a result maybe buy less books (we’ll see…), in 2026 is going… Okay, it’s only been nine days, so far, but I think I’m doing alright so far. If the year ended tomorrow, I could say I kept my resolution. What? It’s a start :o)

Anyway… I was looking for something to read, yesterday, and noticed ‘We Used To Live Here’ , sat on a shelf that I generally don’t pay a lot of attention to. You know that feeling you get when it is exactly the right time to read a particular book? Well, I finally got that feeling about ‘We Used To Live Here’ last night so sat down for a read and…

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 deep in the mountains.

One day, a man knocks on the door. He says he lived there years before and asks if he can show his family around.

But, as soon as they enter, strange things start to happen. Eve is desperate 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 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?

So… Was there something wrong with the house or was it all in Eve’s head? Of course I’m not going to say here but what I will say is that I made sure to finish ‘We Used To Live Here’, just so I could find out, one way or the other.

A seemingly ordinary (albeit just a little bit weird) encounter slowly develops into something chilling that has both Eve and the reader questioning her sanity. I really enjoyed the way that Kliewer draws this out over the course of the book, making everything deliberately vague (even the info-dumping ‘clues’ that might be not actually be clues at all, or might be…) in such a way that the questions kept me constantly reading. And when I wasn’t asking questions, I felt like I was constantly on edge, waiting for something to happen. When, it does… It becomes clear very quickly why Netflix have picked up the rights. The ending in particular is brutal yet strangely hopeful at the same time. I don’t think we’ll ever see a sequel but I think Kliewer has left a little room for one, just in case. You come away with the feeling that while Eve may have hit a wall, Charlie hasn’t given up just yet. I like the open-ended note that it all ends on.

‘We Used To Live Here’ is a little bit ‘haunted house’ and a little ‘bit cosmic horror’, all at the same time, and along with all the conspiracy theories, there is plenty to ponder on here. That’s only half of the experience though. I wasn’t too sure about Eve, to start off with, but she very quickly becomes a fascinating character to follow, caught up in something beyond her understanding but self-aware enough to wonder if she is actually putting herself through hell. ‘We Used To Live Here’ loves to question the nature of reality and Eve isn’t afraid to question the nature of hers.

I’ll be honest, ‘We Used To Live Here’ was a tough nut to crack initially (a tiny bit too much detail to get through to start off with, at least from where I was sat) but the concept is immediately engaging and Kliewer delivers his plot superbly. And as I was reading the book, I was thinking that I wouldn’t mind seeing it on the TV… :o)

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