We Used to Live Here: A Novel

You know those stories that go bump in the night? This, most definitely, is one of those. Marcus Kliewer’s first novel is an old-fashioned ghost story about a haunted house.

Eve and Charlie (Charlotte) are a queer couple who flip houses for a living. They’ve just bought an ancient pile in backwoods Oregon and plan to either fix it up or level it. Charlie is out, but Eve is home on just the first page of the book when there’s a knock on the door. No, it’s not the boogeyman, but a very nice nuclear family consisting of mom, dad and their three children.

Their story is that they’re moving across the country—the moving van is at the bottom of the driveway—and on impulse they decided to stop in to see the place where Dad, Thomas, grew up. “15 minutes, tops,” he says. Eve, a people pleaser, is about to send them on their way, but then relents at the last minute. Big mistake! This family and this house are like the cockroach motel—they can enter but they can’t leave.

The family is bizarrely normal. Mom is religious, but Dad and the kids don’t appear to follow suit. The little girl immediately bolts for the basement, and it turns out she’s really good at hiding. Finding her takes a while, and meanwhile all sorts of odd things happen. In haunted houses doors slam, weird ghostly figures are seen, noises—something being dragged—are heard. All that is present here and you may have read it before.

Then it starts snowing, and the bridge—one way in, one way out—is closed. Well, they’ll have to spend the night, won’t they? Kliewer is pretty good at setting all of this up. Starting from normalcy is a good tactic, because the family can get progressively weirder as the story goes along.

Charlie finally shows up, but she seems off. In fact, everyone seems off, including the kindly old neighbor who may know more than she’s telling. Eve is the only one who isn’t acting weird, or so it seems. Is there a bit of Invasion of the Body Snatchers brewing? Of course there is. Maybe it’s the house that’s in charge, not the people.

The author throws in found documents, transcripts, group chats, that appear to have come from some conspiracy theorist’s cache. Don’t miss the morse code! The Old House—this very house—has a big following on the Internet, but they differ widely on What It All Means.

Kliewer’s book has more clues than the average Sherlock Holmes case. Weird symbols are found carved into the woodwork, piles of old paintings (present, then disappeared) seem to suggest various scenarios, the dark basement takes on many shapes and sizes, a stained-glass window is suddenly plain glass, and the old dumbwaiter appears and then is gone.

All this is fine but Kliewer—a sometime stop-motion animator who otherwise writes well—never ties it all up. The book’s conclusion leaves most of that stuff dangling, and the reader is left with, well, don’t open the door when a former owner wants a little look around. Everything is not as it seems, but it never really comes clear who’s the puppet master. With this many red herrings you can feed a multitude.

If it all seems very cinematic, Hollywood thinks so, too—We Used to Live Here is to be a Netflix movie starring Blake Lively.