Marcus Kliewer, a writer and stop-motion animator and a  new “titan of the macabre and unsettling” comes a supernatural horror about a young woman who accepts a caretaking job from Craigslist, only to discover the position has consequences far greater- and more dangerous- than  she ever could have imagined.

His debut novel “We Used to Live Here began life as a serialised short story Reddit, where it won the Scariest Story of 2021 award on the NoSleep Forum. Film rights were snapped up by Netflix, and it was acquired by Simon & Schuster for publication even before it had been extended into a full-length novel. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.

Macy Mullins can’t say why the job posting grabbed her attention-it had the pull of a fisherman’s lure, barbed hook and all- vaguely ominous. But after an endless string of failed job interviews, she’s not exactly in the position to be picky. She has rent to pay, groceries to buy, and a younger sister to provide for.

Besides, it’s only three days’ work cooped up in a stranger’s house, surrounded by Oregon Coast wilderness.

What starts as a peculiar side gig soon becomes a waking nightmare. An incomprehensible evil may dwell on this property- and Macy Mullins might just be the only thing standing between it, and the rest of humanity. Follow the Rites. From a house flipping project that flipped a woman’s life upside down, to a Craigslist job nightmare straight from the online stranger danger panic,  which Kliewer calls it “low-budget horror writing, I pretend the book I’m writing is a film with limited monetary resources, and I can’t just have “CGI insanity” for every single scene.

The Caretaker is a visually inspired Gothic storytelling  which takes a familiar poor premise and make it his own, drawing you into a lucid.

The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer, Simon Schuster/ Atria/Emily Bestler Books, 320 pages $20.50