The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer

★★★☆☆ The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer

⚠️ Major spoiler warning — this review contains the ending and major plot developments.

The Caretaker is one of those annoying books where I liked a lot of what the author was doing, but the execution of the finale left me cold. Marcus Kliewer writes in brief, snappy chapters that keep the pages turning and, for much of the novel, he constructs a wonderfully unsettling sense that something is very wrong. At just over 290 pages it should be an incredibly quick read and for the first half it was absolutely so. Unfortunately my increasing difficult relationship with the protagonist made the last third a lot more of a trudge than it needed to be.

The atmosphere is easily the most powerful component. Kliewer is very good at creeping dread, letting the situation slowly get stranger and more threatening without giving away his hand. The prose is clean and accessible, the pacing works brilliantly at first, and the eventual descriptions of the Visitors’ true forms are wonderfully revolting. There is something really disgusting in the putrid corrupted imagery around them – and I say this as a full compliment. The book works very well when the horror is allowed to be horror.

But my biggest problem was with the protagonist. Around the halfway point I stopped feeling sorry for her and started being actively annoyed by her. She is told over and over and fails repeatedly to do the simplest things to protect herself, her sister, and eventually mankind itself. As the situation became more serious the more frustrated I became. There is a limit to the effectiveness of tension, because how many times can a character be given clear instructions, make the wrong decision and suffer the consequences before the tension becomes inevitability? I had a pretty good idea of where this was going long before the finale because I knew she would inevitably make the worst possible choice.

which leads to the frustration at the end. Her motivation has always been almost entirely based on protecting her sister, but at the same time she ignores or dismisses a lot of what her sister really tells her. Her answer, in the end, is essentially the answer of a broken, petulant child who decides that if she can’t have the life she wants, then everyone else can just suffer with her. Maybe it’s meant to be consciously bleak, but I struggled to feel sorry for it. It felt less like tragedy and more like watching someone hold the whole of humanity to ransom because they didn't like the hand they'd been dealt.

And then there’s the light switch. The light switch. Good gawd. Few books have made me want to scream at them as much as this one. It is a simple action that makes the scale of what she ultimately allows to happen absurdly frustrating. Just turn the bloody light on. Instead she effectively sentences every living soul to unimaginable horror and torment, because she can't bring herself to do one incredibly basic task. Call me cruel, but by now I wasn't scared for her anymore. I was beginning to hope that the Visitors would put her out of her self-imposed misery.

There is also a curious inconsistency in the final chapters which particularly jarred me. At one point she wonders if this strange new existence is her life now, if she finally has a purpose, even dreams of a future where her sister might somehow join her at the house. But only a few chapters later she makes the decision that effectively condemns humanity to hell on earth. It is so sharp a turn as to undercut what immediately precedes it. It didn’t feel like the inevitable culmination of her emotional arc, but more like the ending demanded she make a catastrophic decision and so she just did.

Perhaps beneath that conclusion is a more profound pessimism about humanity — that individual resentment, selfishness and emotional pain can trump responsibility to the rest of us. If so, Kliewer is certainly committed to it. I took the ending as a very bleak portrait of a person so wholly absorbed in their own circumstances that the suffering of everyone outside their immediate world is almost irrelevant. Whether it was intentional or not, that reading certainly left an impression. When that red sun finally came up, I was thinking that if this world really was populated only by people capable of making decisions like hers, maybe the Visitors deserved their turn.

With all that, I wouldn’t stay away from Marcus Kliewer in the future. Far from it: I really enjoyed his writing style, his ability to create unease and his use of short chapters to build momentum. We Used to Live Here is still solidly on my TBR and I’ve heard that it is the better of the two. The Caretaker had a great mystery, some genuinely effective horror imagery and a strong atmosphere of creeping dread. Unfortunately for me, it dropped the ball when it came to sticking the landing. A protagonist that I grew to dislike more and more drained much of the tension from the finale and turned what should have been a horrifying conclusion into something I found mostly infuriating. Great atmosphere, disturbing imagery and wonderfully creeping dread, but a deeply frustrating protagonist and disappointing execution of the ending kept it from being something much better. Revert to original sentence

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⚠️ Major spoiler warning — this review contains the ending and major plot developments.

The Caretaker is one of those annoying books where I liked a lot of what the author was doing, but the execution of the finale left me cold. Marcus Kliewer writes in brief, snappy chapters that keep the pages turning and, for much of the novel, he constructs a wonderfully unsettling sense that something is very wrong. At just over 290 pages it should be an incredibly quick read and for the first half it was absolutely so. Unfortunately my increasing difficult relationship with the protagonist made the last third a lot more of a trudge than it needed to be.

The atmosphere is easily the most powerful component. Kliewer is very good at creeping dread, letting the situation slowly get stranger and more threatening without giving away his hand. The prose is clean and accessible, the pacing works brilliantly at first, and the eventual descriptions of the Visitors’ true forms are wonderfully revolting. There is something really disgusting in the putrid corrupted imagery around them – and I say this as a full compliment. The book works very well when the horror is allowed to be horror.

But my biggest problem was with the protagonist. Around the halfway point I stopped feeling sorry for her and started being actively annoyed by her. She is told over and over and fails repeatedly to do the simplest things to protect herself, her sister, and eventually mankind itself. As the situation became more serious the more frustrated I became. There is a limit to the effectiveness of tension, because how many times can a character be given clear instructions, make the wrong decision and suffer the consequences before the tension becomes inevitability? I had a pretty good idea of where this was going long before the finale because I knew she would inevitably make the worst possible choice.

which leads to the frustration at the end. Her motivation has always been almost entirely based on protecting her sister, but at the same time she ignores or dismisses a lot of what her sister really tells her. Her answer, in the end, is essentially the answer of a broken, petulant child who decides that if she can’t have the life she wants, then everyone else can just suffer with her. Maybe it’s meant to be consciously bleak, but I struggled to feel sorry for it. It felt less like tragedy and more like watching someone hold the whole of humanity to ransom because they didn't like the hand they'd been dealt.

And then there’s the light switch. The light switch. Good gawd. Few books have made me want to scream at them as much as this one. It is a simple action that makes the scale of what she ultimately allows to happen absurdly frustrating. Just turn the bloody light on. Instead she effectively sentences every living soul to unimaginable horror and torment, because she can't bring herself to do one incredibly basic task. Call me cruel, but by now I wasn't scared for her anymore. I was beginning to hope that the Visitors would put her out of her self-imposed misery.

There is also a curious inconsistency in the final chapters which particularly jarred me. At one point she wonders if this strange new existence is her life now, if she finally has a purpose, even dreams of a future where her sister might somehow join her at the house. But only a few chapters later she makes the decision that effectively condemns humanity to hell on earth. It is so sharp a turn as to undercut what immediately precedes it. It didn’t feel like the inevitable culmination of her emotional arc, but more like the ending demanded she make a catastrophic decision and so she just did.

Perhaps beneath that conclusion is a more profound pessimism about humanity — that individual resentment, selfishness and emotional pain can trump responsibility to the rest of us. If so, Kliewer is certainly committed to it. I took the ending as a very bleak portrait of a person so wholly absorbed in their own circumstances that the suffering of everyone outside their immediate world is almost irrelevant. Whether it was intentional or not, that reading certainly left an impression. When that red sun finally came up, I was thinking that if this world really was populated only by people capable of making decisions like hers, maybe the Visitors deserved their turn.

With all that, I wouldn’t stay away from Marcus Kliewer in the future. Far from it: I really enjoyed his writing style, his ability to create unease and his use of short chapters to build momentum. We Used to Live Here is still solidly on my TBR and I’ve heard that it is the better of the two. The Caretaker had a great mystery, some genuinely effective horror imagery and a strong atmosphere of creeping dread. Unfortunately for me, it dropped the ball when it came to sticking the landing. A protagonist that I grew to dislike more and more drained much of the tension from the finale and turned what should have been a horrifying conclusion into something I found mostly infuriating. Great atmosphere, disturbing imagery and wonderfully creeping dread, but a deeply frustrating protagonist and disappointing execution of the ending kept it from being something much better.