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.
