Canadian author Marcus Kliewer pushes horror conventions

When Marcus Kliewer, a writer with a knack for scaring the bejeebers out of readers, was still a youngster growing up in the British Columbia interior, his imagination was already at full play. After all, a forbidding and mysterious world existed not far from his front door.

"We had a forest behind us and that forest was kind of a stretch forever," he remembers. You can hear the excitement in his voice. "You could walk into it and have search and rescue looking for you."

Or, maybe, you might stumble on an isolated house that portends something truly weird and horrific. Such possibilities were racing through Kliewer's mind when starting work on his new novel, The Caretaker.

"I just wanted people to have a good read," he says. That's something of an understatement, given his reputation for creating horrors on the printed page. Here he would do so by proving that even subject matter as time-worn as the haunted house can still deliver shocks.

Kliewer is following in formidable footsteps — Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Henry James's Turn Of The Screw, J.B. Priestley's The Old Dark House, Stephen King's The Shining, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. But with The Caretaker, he sets out to prove how creepily it can still take hold in a world of Uber drivers, smartphones and Craigslist.

This is the world of Macy Mullins, a smart and savvy child of the internet age but also a victim of an economy that leaves her desperately in need of a job. She's 22, with no money in the bank and rent to be paid, when she spots an "exciting opportunity" in an online listing — "Caretaker for elderly husband urgently needed."

She will be paid thousands for only three days work — what could go wrong? Plenty as it turns out.

The house may not seem that distant from an urban environment, but it's shrouded in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest and will plunge Macy into a waking nightmare.

Kliewer thinks the idea of a haunted house has always tapped into something universal in the human consciousnesses. "People can relate to it even if they don't believe in haunted houses themselves," he tells Postmedia from his Vancouver home.

So is evil seeping through the rooms and passageways entrusted to Macy's care? Are the "rites" she must follow essential to repelling the unspeakable? Here's a dwelling seemingly infected with some indescribable horror — yet Kliewer raises the goosebumps, not with blood and gore but with the power of suggestion.

At the same time, he turns convention on its ear. Here it's not an eerie darkness that threatens but the house lights that ominously keep turning on, and the stern requirement that Macy must immediately turn them off to avoid cosmic disaster. Furthermore, why must rabbits be kept out of the house? And what are the malignant forces that keep her from fleeing?

"The normal trope in horror is to turn the lights off because that's when the monster will get you," Kliewer admits. But that's not how it is for him. "The idea of lights turning on terrifies me. I feel it in the hairs of my neck. I find that taking a lot of the tropes and doing the opposite of what you might expect, in a subtle way, whether it's a door closing or opening — that really gets under the skin."

Kliewer, 33, is a former animator whose foray into supernatural fiction began with a short story, We Used To Live Here, that he wrote for Reddit's r/nosleep sub. That triggered the website's "scariest story of the year" award and expansion into a four-part serial that was snapped up by Netflix for a film starring Blake Lively. That in turn led to a full-length novel published to critical acclaim in 2024.

Kliewer's arrival on the horror scene comes at a time when the genre is once again flying high on page — and on screen where, led by Sinners, it dominated this year's Oscar nominations. The Caretaker arrives this month as the first title to be issued by 12:O1 Books, a new horror imprint launched by publisher Emily Bestler under the Simon and Schuster banner.

Not so long ago, Kliewer points out, horror was considered "a low-class form, a kind of trash … but now we have horror films and books taken seriously and winning awards." So what's the attraction?

For him personally, as an author, it's the idea of being able to take things that cause anxiety, or are hard to process, and putting them into a manageable control form. "It's like seeing a dangerous animal from a distance or watching a Great White Shark on a nature documentary and thinking — OK I don't need to worry about it taking my leg off because it's on a screen. There's something primally satisfying about that."