Notes from the Shelf

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We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer is a 312-page horror novel. Eve and Charlie are a young queer couple who flips houses, and they can’t believe the killer deal they’ve just landed: an old house in a picturesque neighborhood.

One day Eve is alone working on the house, and there’s a knock on the door. A man and his family stand there, claiming it’s his childhood home and asking if it’s alright to show the kids around. Ever the people pleaser, Eve ends up letting them in.

However, as soon as the strangers enter the home, inexplicable things start to happen, including the family’s youngest child going missing and a ghostly presence materializing in the basement. Even more weird, the family can’t seem to take the hint to leave. Then Charlie suddenly vanishes, and Eve slowly loses her grip on what’s real. Something is terribly wrong, or is Eve just imagining things?

I read this book a lot quicker than I had thought, it really grips you and pulls you in. It’s also an anxiety-inducing read because things just feel so wrong and unsettling from the beginning even though there wasn’t anything outright wrong to start. I also was just so disappointed in Eve letting them in. She had convinced them to leave but then she felt guilty and just let them! Obviously it’s to advance the plot, there would be no story if she didn’t let them in, but I was still disappointed!

This book seems to be about portals to different realities and possibly about mimics. There’s a lot of supporting documents in this book that tie in to what’s going on and things to decipher, and a lot of it is up to interpretation. Each document has morse code at the end and there’s different letters capitalized in certain documents that give hints as well as anagrams and codes to solve.

There’s lots of little details to piece together, and full disclosure, the end of the book is not very satisfying and does not tie everything together. I’m left with more questions than answers. There are lots of theories out there for what’s going on, and the author periodically does AMAs or posts on Instagram with more hints, so I could see that being frustrating for some readers.

Because of that, We Used to Live Here isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I really liked trying to solve the puzzles and put things together. Also, there’s a community online that shares their solutions and theorizes together, so that was a fun aspect of this book for me. It will probably be one of those books I re-read periodically because there’s just so much to process.

I give We Used to Live Here 5 stars.

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