There’s a particular kind of horror that lives in the gap between a small task and its enormous consequences. Vacuum the rug, or the house will bite you. Answer the phone, or humanity ends at sunrise. Marcus Kliewer, one of the more interesting voices working in internet-grown horror today, turns that gap into the central engine of his sophomore novel, The Caretaker.
The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer is a supernatural horror story wearing thriller clothing, with a quiet grief memoir buried underneath. It follows his debut, We Used to Live Here, which famously began as a serialized Reddit short on r/NoSleep before Netflix bought the film rights and Simon & Schuster snapped up the book. Expectations for this follow-up were steep. Mostly, they are met.
The Hook (Baited, Barbed, and Very Hard to Shake)
Macy Mullins is twenty-two, buried in student debt, and trying to keep her younger sister Jemma in inhalers and rent. Her graphic design degree has yielded nothing but ChatGPT rejection emails. When a Craigslist posting appears promising three days of caretaking work for what turns out to be nine thousand dollars, she bites.
The house is 5637 Brooksview Heights, tucked into Oregon Coast woods about ninety minutes outside Salem. The employer is Grace Carnswel, a composed older widow. The job, as presented on a VHS tape recorded by Grace’s late husband David, comes with instructions. Lots of them. Keep the lights on. Keep the pictures on the walls. Never open the study door. Never speak to visitors with cold blue eyes who arrive between six at night and six in the morning. Keep your heart rate under 150 BPM. Handle the rabbits. Follow the Rites.
Fail them, and a red sun rises over Brooksview. A red sun rising is the worst thing that could ever happen.
What Kliewer Gets Exactly Right
The opening stretch of The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer is an exercise in withholding. Macy tries, reasonably and stubbornly, to explain everything away. Faulty wiring. Grieving widow. Paranoid old man with a camcorder. The reader builds the same fragile scaffolding she does. By the time the first rite breaks, you are complicit in having ignored the signs.
Three things stand out as genuine craft:
- Compulsion weaponized as horror. The Rites read like an externalized anxiety loop. The intrusive voice that whispers “if you do not check this lock, something terrible will happen” gets taken at face value here. The result is a horror engine that hits uncomfortably close if you have ever lived with compulsive thinking.
- Sensory specificity. Kliewer writes with a stop-motion animator’s eye for texture. The buzz of a dying incandescent bulb. The click of a gas burner refusing to catch. Wet shoeprints on hardwood. A FitLyfe bracelet blinking 151 BPM. These small details carry the atmosphere more than any monster reveal ever could.
- Macy and Jemma. The sister dynamic is the soul of the book. Jemma is a mouthy, blue-licorice-chewing fifteen-year-old who calls Brooksview “the haunted house” and tells Macy that if she dies there, it’s her own fault. Their banter is funny and raw. It earns the stakes when things eventually go sideways.
Where the Book Loosens Its Grip
No horror novel lands a four-star average without legitimate critique, and The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer has soft spots worth naming.
Pacing in the middle act
Once all the Rites are on the table, the story slows. The loop of check the light, put up the picture, check the time, check the heart rate is meant to feel like a grind, and it does. But there’s a thin line between oppressive and monotonous, and the book occasionally drifts across it. Readers who come for steady escalation may grow restless around the halfway mark.
Backstory that arrives too heavy
Some of Macy’s personal history lands too fast and too loud. Kliewer wants the Visitors to weaponize her private pain, which is a strong idea, but a few of the revelations come piped through the entity’s voice rather than dramatized in scene. The machinery of the flashbacks shows.
An ending that will divide readers
Without spoilers: the book lands on a tonal beat rather than a narrative one. Some readers will find it the perfect closing note. Others will feel shortchanged, as if the contract was only half-signed.
Voice, Style, and the r/NoSleep Inheritance
Kliewer writes Macy in a tight first person that sounds like a real twenty-something who spends too much time online. She is self-deprecating, profane, and observant. There are running jokes about AI-generated billboard couples, “high-value” podcast bros riding in Uber back seats, and a boarded-up motel Jemma nicknames the “Post Malone Inn.” These light notes keep the dread livable.
Structurally, the book wears its Reddit horror heritage proudly. Short chapters. Punchy titles. Scene breaks that snap like light switches. Literary-horror purists may find it too serialized. Readers who grew up refreshing r/NoSleep at two in the morning will feel right at home.
What This Book Is Really About
Strip away the white rabbits, the yellow rain ponchos, and the cold blue eyes, and The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer is a book about being young, poor, and responsible for someone who needs you. The supernatural pressure on Macy runs on the same fuel as the ordinary pressure of making rent, buying her sister’s inhaler, and dragging herself back from the edge of a loss she never properly grieved. The horror is the Visitors. The horror is also Greg from the insurance company calling to explain why her father’s claim just got denied.
That is the book’s quietest ambition, and it will be its dividing line. Readers who want horror as pure ride may feel lectured. Readers who want horror that actually means something will find a novel that earns its sadness.
Similar Reads for Fans of This Book
If this novel lands for you, these titles sit well on the same shelf:
- We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer. His debut. Oregon-adjacent, similarly built on intrusion and escalating wrongness.
- Penpal by Dathan Auerbach. Another Reddit-born horror novel assembled from accumulating dread.
- The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones. For grief rendered as a pursuing thing.
- Bird Box by Josh Malerman. For rules-based horror and a sibling duo at its core.
- A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. For domestic horror that could be psychological, could be supernatural, probably both.
- The Ritual by Adam Nevill. For woods, boundaries, and something watching that really should not be there.
The Verdict on The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer
The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer is not a flawless novel, but it is a confident and ambitious one. Kliewer has settled into a lane, call it lo-fi rules-based horror with a therapy bill, and he drives it hard. Forgive the middle-act repetition and an ending that trusts mood over resolution, and you get a book that sticks to the walls of your house for a few nights afterward. Check the lights before bed. Pick up the phone, or don’t.