I checked out The Caretaker because horror subreddit kept hyping it up as one of the best horror releases of the year. That usually goes one of two ways for me: either I find a new favorite, or I spend 300 - 400 pages wondering if we all read the same book. Thankfully, this one absolutely delivered. It’s pretty awesome and unnerving.

Macy takes a weird caretaker job in the middle of nowhere because she’s broke, exhausted, and trying to keep herself and her younger sister afloat. Naturally, this turns into the worst employment experience imaginable. Forget toxic management. This house may literally doom humanity.

Kliewer knows how to build the suffocating sense of dread so that even ordinary things start to feel wrong. Lights. Doors. Phone calls. Written instructions. A rabbit. Especially the rabbit. 

Macy makes the horror effective. At first, her narration almost tricks you into lowering your guard. She’s self-deprecating, awkward, traumatized, and kind of funny in a very tired way. Like, her life is already a disaster anyway. There’s humor in the narration, and she has enough distance from her own misery that the book initially feels lighter than I expected. Then the paranoia starts creeping in. Slowly, carefully, the story pushes her closer and closer to the edge of a complete breakdown, and I loved how convincingly Kliewer handled that spiral.

A lot of horror protagonists make dumb decisions because the plot needs them to. Macy makes bad decisions because she’s mentally and emotionally wrecked. That difference matters. She’s grieving, desperate, isolated, sleep deprived, and clinging to the hope that following the rites might somehow keep everything together. The horror here is less about shocking reveals and more about endurance and trying to hold onto reality while reality keeps slipping sideways.

The middle and final sections especially hit hard for me. The paranoia becomes relentless. Every interaction feels poisoned with doubt. You never fully know what’s real, who can be trusted, or whether Macy herself can still trust her own mind. Kliewer does an excellent job making the reader feel trapped inside that unraveling headspace.

I also appreciated how the book plays with rules. The rites feel absurd right up until they don’t. There’s almost an OCD-like rhythm to them, this terrifying idea that if you fail one tiny ritual, catastrophe follows. It creates this constant tension where even flipping a light switch feels loaded with existential dread.

And that ending. Brutal. I'll definitely remember it even if I'm not sure if I actually liked what just happened to me. 

I’ve seen some readers get frustrated with Macy or with how chaotic the second half becomes, and I get it. This book absolutely wants you to feel anxious, helpless, and stuck in a downward spiral. For me, that’s exactly why it worked so well. Marcus Kliewer knows how to weaponize uncertainty better than most horror writers I’ve read recently.

By the end, I felt like I’d experienced something and I’ll take that over cheap shocks any day.