varingblaarWe Used to Live Here by Markus Kliewer
Spoiler warning: If you haven't read We Used to Live Here, I suggest you do so before going any further. If this spoils it for you, it's not my fault.You have been warned.
Familiar Premise with a Twist
The premise seems familiar; Someone shows up while you're home alone and you can't get rid of them. Sure. Except we take every part of that trope and tweak it a little bit.
Our protagonist Eve and her partner Charlie are house flippers. But this is a horror story, so of course this is a big spooky house far from the nearest town. Eve is home alone when people knock on the door. Whole family, actually. "We used to live here, can I show them around?" All the red flags, but also Eve has problems with saying no. So here we are. Whole family in my house, with a storm outside so the people can't leave and Charlie can't show up.
What Is Even Real?
Right off the bat there's a white lie about checking with Charlie. If Eve is already spinning a white lie, are the visitors also lying? That doubt settles in and becomes the norm for the first half of the novel.
Who's telling the truth? When Thomas the dad tells stories about the house, is he making stuff up through keen observation? At some point he mentioned a dumb waiter that he couldn't have known about. So maybe it's all true?
After a while people start saying things that clearly didn't happen. But they all agree? A phone goes missing, later a kid has the phone, but after an argument it turns out to be his own phone? Can I trust my own perception? Or is this gaslighting? Is this their method? Do they make you feel crazy to manipulate you? Is that what happened to Alison?
When the stained glass window changes to a normal window, this feels like the first external validation that something strange is happening. Charlie confirms that the window did change. Charlie agrees it's time to leave.
This makes the body snatching scene more creepy. Real Charlie calls fake Charlie to warn Eve it's not her. One with a tattoo and the other without. Realising the person next to you is an impostor is a trope for a reason; Because it's evocative. Again your perceptions might be incorrect. But what adds weight to this, is that this person, the impostor, is the only person that has validated your lack of craziness.
Back at the house, we're in full gaslight mode. The family calls her Emma, refusing to acknowledge her as Eve. Everything is wrong and the unsettling feeling has now turned completely to anger, both for the character and for me as the reader. Eventually she ends up in a psychiatric hospital. Apparently there's no record that Eve ever existed? Maybe this was a person we made up all along...
The Man in the Woods
I'm not sure what his purpose was. Exposition? Was he just there to confirm to the reader exactly how weird things are? And then he's gone later? So it might've been part of the same psychotic break?
The novel built up to him being important. At the bottom of every section there was a little group of dots and dashes. I immediately thought it might be Morse code, and punched it into an online translator. When the guy in the forest shows up, I thought this would be the big revelation that ties the whole backstory together. I was a little disappointed.
r/nosleep
The story in the novel is interrupted by newspaper articles and external ephemera. It reminds me of Carrie by Stephen King, except the articles are tangentially related, if at all. It's definitely creepy. It shows the origins of the story, as a collection of Reddit nosleep posts. It has that disjointed narrative and not all the loose ends are tied up nicely.
Apparently the story was optioned for a movie by Netflix before it was even a book. It definitely reads like a horror movie.
