Tag: thriller

#REVIEW: The Caretaker, by Marcus Kliewer

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

This is one of those books that you finish, put down, and then mutter “Fuuuuuck…” under your breath.

Marcus Kliewer has, I believe, written two books. I read his debut, We Used to Live Here, and reviewed it here. My review was a little on the mixed side; WUtLH features a really unreliable narrator, a literary trick I generally don’t get along with very well, and its genre is mindfuck. One thing that I’m noticing as I’m rereading the review, though, is that I finished the book in one sitting.

I also finished The Caretaker in one sitting, and I did not have “read an entire book cover to cover” on my to-do list for today. Now, granted, this isn’t a terribly long book, coming in under 300 pages and with a largish font on top of that, but I genuinely did not put it down once while I was reading it. This means that Marcus Kliewer has written two books, I have read them both, and I didn’t put either of them down while I was reading them.

That’s … really impressive.

The Caretaker is also a mindfuck, although not as intensely so as WUtLH. The main character, Macy Mullins, is a twenty-something and a bit of a fuck-up, with a doozy of an anxiety issue on top of that. She’s the parental figure for her younger sister Jenna, a seventeen-year-old with a penchant for casual shoplifting. Macy is broke and jobless, and the sisters are about to be evicted from their apartment when Macy happens to spot a want ad for a temporary caretaker position. She interviews and discovers that she’s being offered nine thousand dollars, a life-changing amount of money, for the simple task of three days of house-sitting. The house is old and isolated, buried deep in the wilderness off the coast of Oregon, but despite her sister’s reservations she jumps at it.

Oh, and there are some minor things you need to do while you’re house-sitting. No big deal. The former owner had some, uh, quirks, and maybe some OCD, and maybe a lot of OCD, and his wife promised him that as long as she lived in the house she’d keep up his little rituals that he thought literally kept the world safe. A promise is a promise, though, right? Here’s the list. Again, no big deal. Simple stuff.

You might not be surprised to learn that things don’t go well. Otherwise this isn’t that much of a book, right? Macy babysits the house and makes sure none of the lights turn on in the middle of the night. She makes a ton of money, buys a used car, and gets her and her sister back on track now that she can get to work. The end!

Nah.

Full disclosure: I got sucked directly into this book and it dragged me along at a breakneck pace until I was done with it, and it might be the kind of book I wake up tomorrow and find a dozen huge plot holes in. The three major book services I use for ratings– Amazon, Goodreads and Storygraph– all have it at under 4 stars, which isn’t alarming, necessarily, but it means the book isn’t exactly garnering universal acclaim. But oh, man, the ride it takes you on is great. It’s creepy as hell and the main character makes nothing but bad decisions from start to finish and if I could have found a way to cover my eyes and read the whole book through the cracks in my fingers I might have, except I haven’t found a way to turn pages or hold a book while I’m doing that. But I’m keeping a close eye on this Kliewer fellow from now on; I actually picked this one up from Aardvark without immediately realizing it was the We Used to Live Here guy. I will not be forgetting his name again.

Give it a read. Just make sure you have a few hours set aside before you do.

#REVIEW: A House of Dynamite (2025)

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, ReviewsLeave a comment

Two movies? In two days? Madness!

You may recall that last year I read a book called Nuclear War: A Scenario. I called it the scariest book I had ever read, and while I absolutely cannot say that I enjoyed it, it ended up at a pretty high position on my Best Books of the Year list at the end of the year.

Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is, technically, not a film adaptation of Nuclear War: A Scenario, or at least, if it is, it never claims it. That said, it may as well be: a single nuclear missile is launched from an unknown source (in NWAS, it’s immediately attributed to North Korea) toward what is eventually determined to be Chicago. The movie tells the story of the seventeen minutes between the detection of the launch and the impact of the missile three times from the perspective of three different groups of characters in the American government, all ending as the president makes his decision about what the US’s plan of retaliation will be. That decision is described by one character as “surrender or suicide,” and it’s not clear that there is really a whole lot of daylight between those two scenarios.

You might think that watching the same twenty minutes three times (the film’s runtime is just under two hours, so there’s not exactly a clock ticking in the corner for the entire movie) might be repetitive enough to drain some of the tension out of the film. For me, at least, it absolutely wasn’t, and the fact that you hear some of the same conversations three times over the course of the movie didn’t cut the drama at all. This might be partially attributable to my age– I think us ’80s kids are going to get hit harder by this movie than the generations before or after us, as the threat of dying by nuclear annihilation was something that was hanging over our heads for our entire childhood and we’ve internalized that very differently than people who didn’t go through that. But I had to go outside and mow the lawn after watching this movie just to burn off excess nervous energy, and I think it’s gonna have me fucked up for the rest of the day if not for longer than that.

I don’t have a ton to say about the technical aspects of the movie. The music is very effective, quietly echoing Jaws in the worst imaginable way and again plucking at the strings of the ’80s kids. The acting is as good as it needs to be with no really standout performances; the only actor in the film I was previously familiar with was Idris Elba, who plays the President as someone who never really thought he’d have to make the decisions he is faced with and allows just a trace of “Why me?” to come through his performance. Angel Reese has a cameo; I guess I’ve heard of her, but the movie’s not going to live or die on her playing herself for a couple of minutes.

Much like Nuclear War: A Scenario, I can’t really recommend this movie so much as say it’s very effective at what it wants to do and it’s up to you whether you want that in your brain or not. I wouldn’t spend a lot of time reading reviews; they’re very mixed, and I’m guessing that the film’s ending is primarily responsible for that. I’m not spoiling anything; for me, it ended in the best way it could, but clearly a whole lot of other people disagreed.

I think I’ll go mow the lawn again.

(ALSO: If you’re a Movie Person, please follow me on Letterboxd. I need people over there.)

#REVIEW: Dissolution, by Nicholas Binge

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

Are you familiar with Aardvark Book Club, by any chance? For $17.99 a month, assuming you’re in the US, you’ll have a choice of one of six different new (and sometimes unreleased) books across a bunch of genres. The books will be hardcover and are generally of solid quality, so you’re already getting a decent deal, because you can’t sneeze at a hardcover for $18 anymore. Then you can order up to two more from the current month or any previous month for $10 each. I’ve been a member since January, and I have yet to have a month where I didn’t order three books. Most of the time they’ve been from new-to-me authors and there have definitely been more hits than there have misses. I ordered Nicholas Binge’s Dissolution in June basically just because I could.

And … damn.

I’m going to let you know now: this is one of those “trust me” books, because it’s all about the mysteries and twists and turns, and I ain’t spoilin’ nothing. The main character is Maggie Webb, an 84-year-old woman whose husband of fifty years, Stanley, has been disappearing to Alzheimer’s over the past several years. Only one day a Mysterious Stranger (TM, pat. pending) shows up at her door, and, uh, it turns out that maybe it’s not Alzheimer’s. Someone is actively and deliberately removing Stanley’s memories.

And, uh, that person might be Stanley.

Like, you already know, right? You know if you want to read this or not, and if you’re somehow still on the ledge, maybe if I told you that this book was a bizarre combination of the modern-day parts of Assassin’s Creed, the “insane professor” bits of The Poppy War, the movie Memento, and a self-help book about the memory palace, would that help?

Yeah. I picked this up before bed last night, it kept me up until midnight, and I was reading again by 8:30 this morning. You should check it out.

Monthly Reads: March 2025

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, ReadingLeave a comment

There are actually quite a few good choices for Book of the Month in here. The Reformatory? Oathbound? The Unworthy? Martyr!? The Bones Beneath My Skin? All are great choices, but I have to go with Galileo’s Daughter, by Dava Sobel. Review coming in the very near future. Lots of great books this month, though.