Marcus Kliewer – We Used to Live Here

A Review in Internal Conversation

Written by Barry Lee Dejasu

When I talk to people about Marcus Kliewer’s 2024 debut novel We Used to Live Here, I face a bit of an issue when asked the obvious question that somebody unfamiliar with it is likely to ask: “What’s it about?”

Subsequent conversations can be very difficult to maintain. The part of me that respects storytelling and avoids spoiling works for others like the proverbial plague, and the enthusiastic genre fiction fan who excitedly wants to share details about the latest great book he's just read, get into a knife fight in my head.

What unfolds is an ongoing and internal projected dialogue of how exactly to describe the novel, which goes something like this...

So, what’s it about?

It starts off introducing a woman named Eve, who has recently moved into a big, beautiful house with her partner Charlie.

Oooh, a haunted house novel!

No, not quite. I mean…there are no ghosts or demons. It’s not that kind of a book. Eve and Charlie have purchased the house with the intent of flipping it and reselling it, and while Charlie is out one afternoon, Eve gets a visit from a family, whose quirky but charming patriarch Thomas announces that he grew up in that very house, and as the family was driving through the area, he hoped to stop by and show his family his childhood home.

Oh, I see, so it’s a home invasion tale?

Not…exactly. The family doesn’t break out weapons and hold Eve hostage. If anything, their worst offense ostensibly seems to be they’re very awkward. Thomas’ wife Paige is very high-strung, their sons are rambunctious and frequently pick fights with each other, and the youngest child, Jenny, is precocious and nosy. Eve is very torn about letting them in at all, but once she decides that they seem normal enough, she agrees to let them have a brief tour before sending them on their way.

Wait—she invites them in? Sounds like vampires!

Definitely not. In fact, there’s even jokes about that. No, the family seems to be just awkward and imposing, but, things start getting uncomfortable when the daughter discovers a dumbwaiter and takes it down to the basement…a place that Eve has largely avoided from the outset. And from there on out, things get very tense, very uncomfortable, and very disorientating.

I thought you said this isn’t a haunted house novel?

It’s not. I mean…not in any way you’d expect one to be.

Oh, wait, so it’s like Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House? Not ghosts, but still—

No. Not like that at all. And I don’t want to spoil what happens beyond what I’ve already said, which also already feels like I’ve said too much. Suffice to say, I guess I’ll mention some other things that make this novel a bit more…unusual.

For one thing, there are intervals throughout, coming in every couple of chapters, featuring online articles, chat room and social media discussions, and more—

Wait! So this is like Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves?

No-no. There are no lengthy detours and continuing narratives-within-narratives or footnotes here. These interludes are very short and seem to be unrelated to the rest of the tale. They’re honestly more like creepypasta excerpts, which is fitting because this tale started out with Reddit posts from the auth—

So it’s part of the recent trend of creepypasta-expanded novels like Felix Blackwell’s Stolen Tongues or Dathan Auerbach’s Penpal?

No, I didn’t say that. I just said that this involves excerpts of creepypasta-esque writings, which—

You mean like Kiersten White did in Mister Magic, or even Cynthia Murphy’s YA novel The Midnight Game?

…No. The excerpts have their respective relevance to the rest of the novel, but I won’t say more than that.

Oh—except for one thing: there are little collections of dots and dashes at the end of each of the excerpts. For those unfamiliar, these dots and dashes are something called Morse Code, an old analog wartime communication method—and each grouping in the interludes forms a new word. Be sure to look up a translation of each Morse Code word…you’ll ultimately understand not just what they’re all spelling out, but why.

But anyway, if you’re hell-bent on comparing this book to others to get a better idea of what it’s about, I suppose you could say it takes elements of Shirley Jackson’s classic novel The Haunting of—

I KNEW IT! This IS a haunted house novel!

For the last time: NO. Like I said earlier, the journey into the house is very disorientating, with a lot of surreal, trippy descriptions of the house’s very structure seeming to shift around, much like Hill House—

But I thought you said this wasn’t like House of Leaves?

Going to ignore that.

All I’ll leave you with is this: this novel is very, very disturbing. It won’t be obvious or apparent going in, but the deeper into the book—and house—you go, the more and more it ensnares you like a pitcher plant: you delicately pursue the intoxicating mystery inside, but when you find the horrors at its core, and realize the full extent of the sinister machinations that have been at work the whole way through, you can’t turn back. You can’t escape from what you’ve experienced. You’re trapped in a terrible existential revelation, absolutely wrecked by both what has occurred in the story—and what it may mean for everything you think you know.

So…it is like The Haunting of Hill House?

…I give up.

Just avoid all spoilers floating around online and go read Marcus Kliewer’s We Used to Live Here, hands-down the best debut horror novel of 2024.