Book Recommendation from Caitlin

If you have visited the Marmora & Lake Public Library during the past month there is a good chance you had the opportunity to meet our field placement student Caitlin. Before leaving for her next placement gig, Cailtin shared a great book recommendation with the library.

Everyone at the library would like to wish Caitlin the best of luck in her future endeavors!

“Everyone keeps calling me Emma Faust, but my name is Eve Palmer.”

If you’re someone who appreciates a book with a firm resolution, turn back now — this one isn’t for you. The ending will leave you with more questions than answers. But if you love annotating, theorizing, and getting lost in the dark corners of a story, you’ll want to break out your sticky tabs and notebook for this one.

“The walls remember things I don’t. Sometimes I hear the echoes—footsteps, laughter, doors that never closed properly—and I wonder which of us is haunting the other.”— excerpt

Marcus Kliewer weaves together an intricate world where timelines shift and collide, leaving our protagonist, Eve, struggling to maintain her grasp on reality. Described as “quicksand” that “draws readers in with creeping dread and an unsettling atmosphere,” this is a story that pulls you in fast and doesn’t let go. You’ll find yourself eagerly flipping (or, for the eBook readers out there, swiping) page after page, anxious to find out what Eve might encounter next.

Eve Palmer, as with many horror protagonists, is lured into trap after trap, some of which could easily be avoided if her partner, Charlie would have taken her seriously for just a moment. This isn’t to say the story, characters, or Eve herself are unenjoyable; far from it. Kliewer builds a claustrophobic atmosphere that makes you feel Eve’s disorientation as her sense of reality quickly unravels.

“It wasn’t that anything looked wrong—it was that everything looked too familiar. Like we’d built this house before, lived this life before, and ruined it the same way every time.”— excerpt

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Our protagonist Eve and her partner, Charlie, flip homes for a living. Thinking they’ve scored a deal, they purchase a run-down Victorian-style house and temporarily move to a remote corner of Oregon to renovate it. On a particularly snowy afternoon, Eve finds herself home alone when a strange family shows up at the door with a seemingly harmless request, to look around the home where their father once lived.

Eve, too polite (and unable to set any type of boundary) to refuse, agrees to let them in, under the condition that they don’t stay long. What follows is a chilling spiral of confusion, as reality bends around her in ways that make even the reader question what’s real.

Interspersed between chapters are advertisements, doctor’s notes, and internet forum posts that at first seem random, but begin to form a haunting picture as the story unfolds. Keep an eye on the end of each insert, the morse code hidden within reveals a message that spans the entire arc of the novel.

While the story can be a bit predictable at times, it still manages to deliver genuine scares. Especially if you’re easily spooked, like me. (Ask my dog Toto, who I had to carry  to the bathroom with me every night for a week.)

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“Maybe the house was never empty. Maybe it was just waiting for us to remember.”—excerpt

Despite its ambiguity, We Used to Live Here lingers long after you’ve finished it. It’s unsettling in the best way, the kind of psychological horror that stays with you, making you question what’s real and what’s imagined.

If you’re in the mood for something eerie, atmospheric, and mind-bending, check it out from the library! Maybe …. just keep the lights on.