We Used to Live Here Review

Eve is a house flipper in financial straits, currently living in the house she and her partner, Charlie, are flipping. Late one night, while Charlie is away, a family knocks on the door and asks Eve if they can tour the house since the dad, Thomas, used to live there. Although weary, Eve lets them in and things quickly get out of hand, causing Eve to spiral, not knowing what’s reality and what’s delusion. Eve must now figure out what’s going on in the house and who Thomas really is, before it’s too late. 

Summary

The story begins with Eve working on her new house late into the night while her girlfriend, Charlie, is on a booze run for their impending date night. Thomas and his family then show up on their doorstep, asking if they can take a quick 15-minute tour of the inside of the property because Thomas used to live there. Eve really does not want to say yes, as she is such a paranoid person that she has named that scared voice in her head Mo after her favorite toy as a child, but her people pleasing causes her to try to get Charlie to say no for her via phone call. The family asks to stay in the foyer while she calls Charlie, as it’s cold and snowing outside, which Eve reluctantly agrees to. Charlie does not pick up the phone, but Eve uses her as an excuse anyway to get the family to leave. As they begin to leave, Thomas’s daughter, Jenny, shoots Eve a devastated look and she crumples, allowing the family to come back into the house for their tour. 

Thomas begins pointing out things about the house that only a former resident could know, like the missing deer antler chandelier and the formerly black and white tiled floor, which puts Eve at some ease in letting them look around. During the tour, Thomas points out the dumbwaiter that is in the upstairs hall has been wallpapered over and that it leads to the basement. When the family asks to see the basement, Eve declines and tries to hint to them that they should leave, much to Jenny’s chagrin. As the family is leaving, they realize that Jenny is missing, and the dumbwaiter is now uncovered and lowered into the basement. Eve and the family are then forced to descend into the basement to look for her. 

While looking for Jenny in the basement, Eve is deeply unsettled but trying to keep Mo under control. Upon going back toward the entrance of the basement, she sees Thomas eerily still and stiff, staring ahead of himself into the darkness with his flashlight pointed down. When she calls for him, he does not answer. After the third time, Thomas snaps out of it and convinces Eve it’s nothing. He then tells her he knows where Jenny is hiding, and she will not come out until they ignore her and they just have to wait her out.  

They all exit the basement and Charlie arrives home. Charlie is surprised to see these strangers in their home, but after talking with Thomas invites them to stay for dinner while they wait for Jenny to come out of her hiding spot. Eve expresses her concerns about the family to Charlie, which Charlie blows off. During the dinner, Thomas’s extremely religious wife, Paige, inappropriately questions Eve about her upbringing, family life and “lifestyle” after finding out that Eve grew up in the church. Charlie shuts down the conversation, and soon enough Jenny emerges from the basement apologizing profusely. The family once again makes an effort to leave but is thwarted by the snowstorm shutting down the roads. Eve and Charlie decide to let the family stay overnight, given Paige’s paranoia about being in a car during cold weather. Thomas later tells them the story of his childhood in that house, including how his sister, Allison, started to believe things about their lives were wrong or different somehow and went mad. 

Eve wakes up in the middle of the night in need of water, so she goes downstairs to get a glass where she hears a noise in the basement. Thinking that Jenny once again has snuck into the basement, she ventures down to find her. Eve then sees a tall, shadowy figure standing in the basement staring at her. She immediately goes upstairs to alert Charlie that there’s an intruder in the basement, which Charlie ignores in favor of sleep. She insists that she’ll look tomorrow morning. 

Eve wakes up to an empty bed and the smell of pancakes downstairs, thinking that the family must have gone by now, Eve goes downstairs expecting to see Charlie. Instead, the family is still in the house and has made themselves comfortable making breakfast. She also sees the new locket Charlie bought and was wearing is now hanging above the fireplace on a nail she removed yesterday. Thomas insists that Charlie told them they could stay for breakfast before leaving and that she left for a business-related errand in town. Eve is suspicious of this and immediately tries to call Charlie when she realizes her phone is missing. As the family cooks breakfast she frantically looks for it, before finally relenting and asking to borrow a phone. Thomas tells Eve that none of them have phones despite being in the midst of a cross-country move. Eve resolves to call Charlie and takes her dog, Shylo, with her to the neighbor’s to borrow a phone. 

While at the neighbor’s, Eve talks to Charlie but the phone service is spotty and cuts the phone call. Eve learns that Thomas was very familiar with the neighbor and could have stayed with her for the night instead of crashing at her house. The neighbor also reveals that Thomas’s sister was a lost girl who ended up on the family’s doorstep, and after going mad, stabbed Thomas 37 times. 

Eve makes her way back to the house but on the way stumbles upon an old cabin, which Shylo barrels into. There, she sees notes scrawled on one of the interior walls about her house and Thomas. The old man who lives there finds her in the cabin and tells her she has to get Thomas and his family out of her house by any means necessary. Eve hurries home to find the family has locked her out. When they let her back inside, Thomas says they didn’t leave because they didn’t want to leave the house unattended. Eve insists they have to go, to which Paige tells her they don't have the right equipment to drive in the snow. Not wanting a repeat of last night, Eve insists on giving them tire chains for the snow and goes up to the attic to get them.  

When in the attic, she notices things Charlie would never give away in a box labelled “to donate”. Her flashlight then gives out, the attic entrance slams shut, and the figure from the night before reappears and shuffles toward her. Eve can see the figure is actually an old woman with very short black hair wearing a hospital gown and holding a hammer. She screams for help and as the attic entrance opens she falls through and slams her head on the banister below. 

Eve awakes to the family still in her house and now with new items she doesn’t have and has never seen before. Thomas explains that he took some things from their moving van into the house to make Paige more comfortable. Eve gets up and goes upstairs to find Thomas’s son, Kai, holding her phone. When he refuses to give it back, Eve tries to wrestle the phone out of his hand and Shylo bites him. As Eve looks at the phone now in her hand, she can see it is no longer her phone. Paige is upset and this finally gets the family to leave the house. Eve also now realizes that the stained-glass window that used to be in this room is now a regular window, the same age as everything around it. On their way out, Charlie shows up. Thomas talks to Charlie, who then goes to Eve to see if she’s okay. 

Eve tells Charlie too many weird things have happened and she does not want to set foot back in the house. Eve tells Charlie about the window in the upstairs room, and while Charlie is skeptical, she agrees to sleep in a hotel for the night. Charlie still insists on going into the house first to get things she needs to stay in the hotel, and Eve cannot talk her out of it. When Charlie comes back to the car, she tells Eve that she saw that the window was, in fact, different. Eve and Charlie then drive to the nearest motel, which is not abandoned like they previously thought. 

In the motel room, Eve’s inner voice tells her that Charlie is an impostor, so she asks Charlie to tell her how they first met. Charlie obliges and the answer satisfies Eve. They go to sleep. But at 3am someone calls Charlie. Eve sees that it’s her number calling and she takes the call in the bathroom. On the line is Charlie, she says she never made it out of the house when she went in for clothes and that the Charlie Eve is with now is an impostor. Phone Charlie tells Eve to run and not to come back for her, before the line cuts out. When Eve comes out of the bathroom, Charlie asks her what’s wrong and Eve notices that Charlie’s small hand tattoo is completely missing. Eve then runs out of the motel room and drives back to the house to save Charlie. 

When inside of the house, the old woman in the hospital gown tells Eve to hide and she makes her way into the basement. The basement is slightly different, however. Right where the nook where Jenny hid used to be there is a green door. Inside, Eve finds paintings and pictures of Thomas’s family — but he’s not in any of them and his parents are clearly very different than the religious zealots he claimed them to be. A little further in, she finds Charlie being swarmed by ants, who tells he she wasn’t supposed to be there yet. The old woman draws closer and Eve hides in a closet. When the old woman finds her there, she beams memories of her life into Eve’s head and she sees that Thomas was actually the lost boy who showed up unexpectedly and how Allison’s life slowly morphed and bended to fit Thomas’s reality. 

Eve leaves the basement with the old woman’s hammer only to see that the house has changed again. Thomas and his family are in her dining room eating dinner and Thomas begins calling Eve Emma — his sister. He insists on this narrative that she has been staying with his family while she got back on her feet and that she has to move out soon. Eve is trying to hold onto her reality and control but loses it when she sees Paige wearing Charlie’s locket. Eve ends up stabbing Paige in the neck and ripping Thomas’s face open with the hammer before police arrive. 

The book ends with Eve insisting she’s not crazy and somehow Thomas has done to her what he did to Allison, and an entry on an online forum from Charlie saying she’s looking for Eve since she just disappeared one day, but everyone keeps telling her Eve never existed. 

Review 

Author’s Voice 

I really enjoyed this one. I like to match the content I consume in October to all things macabre, creepy and Halloween and this sure fit the bill. I was really surprised to see that this was Kliewer’s first novel, given how well it reads. I particularly enjoyed how slowly Eve morphs from a reliable narrator to an “unreliable” one. Even though we are reading her story, it still becomes harder and harder to believe her as the events of the story go on, especially when she’s going on about how her dog and girlfriend are impostors. The way the story was formulated and formatted really made it feel like a love letter to creepypastas in the best possible way. The emphasis on doppelgangers, online conspiracy spaces, the Mandela effect, lost media, and Capgras seems very weird and random at a second’s glance, but ties together in an extremely captivating narrative. And its interactive elements also felt warranted given the subject matter, feeling almost reminiscent of Goosebumps and the Blair Witch Project. Everything felt neat and thoroughly thought through, which allowed the actual story to shine.

Tension & Pacing 

The scene work was also very solid. There was no manufactured tension by dragging out very minute actions (I’m looking at you Riley Sager!), instead all tension felt earned. Every small thing Thomas does to make Eve uneasy snowballs in these catastrophic ways. By the time he actually leaves you can tell he’s been gaslighting her and is trying to drive a wedge between her and Charlie, which works fantastically for a narrative driven by paranoia and conspiracy. The pacing is also done well. Although 95% of the books happens in less than two days, the book neither feels far-fetched nor too slow. While very little happens during the book's events, the narrative still feels impossibly full. 

The Ending 

What I keep going back and forth on is the ending because so many things are left unanswered. Why does Charlie say Eve wasn’t supposed to be there yet? Who is Thomas and what does he mean by “we” in his final speech to Eve before the cops show up? Where does Thomas’s family come from, are they real people that he’s stolen from other timelines/realities or are they just extensions of him? Are they a part of this mysterious “we” Thomas mentions? Who was the neighbor lady and is her house just another Old House? Why does reality change outside of the Old House and not just inside it? What happened to Allison? Was Fake Charlie really a doppelganger or did Thomas just shift reality again so that Charlie never had that tattoo? Why does Eve’s inner voice change from Mo to something else? These are just a few off the top of my head, and I’m sure I’d have more if reread it. 

Part of me thinks that the open-ended nature of the book ties in well with the themes of conspiracy and reality, and the book’s clear goal to have an interactive readership that uncovers the secrets via internet sleuthing and deciphering book clues, but another part of me can't help but feel dissatisfied that not a single one of the book's major questions are truly answered by the end of the events of the book. It seems clear to me that this is the beginning of a larger book series most likely in the works, but even book series should have a finished ending. I’m of the mindset that books that lead into others should have a concrete ending for the main narrative and a somewhat open-ended ending for the subplot. Major questions posited by the narrative should be answered. BUT not every book needs a happy ending where everything is tied together with a bow. This ending didn’t feel like Kliewer stopped in the middle of the narrative to build tension; the story does come to somewhat of a natural stop. I also don’t how the story could have ended better than it did. All that to say, I’m still on the fence. 

Character Work 

The character work was probably the shakiest part of the narrative and even that I feel just neutral about. A lot of the focus was on Eve and rightfully so, she really was the heart of the story. Her slow descent into madness really sold me on the story, but thinking back on it the other characters feels either inconsequential, blanket creepy, or like caricatures, like how Paige is almost a caricature of a WASP mom or how Kai is a stereotypical smug brat/bully. Even Charlie at times feels like she only disbelieves in things and finds no issue with the family to be an obstacle to Eve (Who would go back to sleep and check "in the morning" for a house intruder that your partner saw? Even if your partner is the paranoid type, that's still a potentially fatal decision). I think with later installments — if We Used To Live Here really is meant to be a series — this could be something Kliewer works on. Because Eve is such a strong character with a strong voice I know the other characters in his stories could easily be punched up a bit. 

The Rating 

Overall, I think I’m gonna give this one 4.5 stars. I really want to give it 5 stars because of how much I enjoyed it, with the interactive elements, the spot on pacing, the familiar yet interesting twist on internet creepy theories, and the subtle yet drastic shift in Eve’s reliability — but I’m too split on the ending. 

If I’m going to give something 5 stars it’s because the issues I had with it were minimal, nonexistent, or easily waved away, but that isn’t the case here. I genuinely cannot make up my mind about whether or not I like ending, and if you anything about me it’s that the ending of a book is the biggest factor in how I rate books. I’ve knocked books down 1-2 stars because of endings before. Good As Gone by Amy Gentry would have been a 5 star book if it weren’t for the ending, that’s how much I enjoyed it, but it’s a 3 because of the ending ALONE. Needless to say, if I can’t decide, it can’t be a 5 star book. So we’ll put it just below. I enjoyed everything else about the book though, and I can’t wait to see what Markus Kliewer does next.