With his debut novel, We Used to Live Here, Vancouver writer Marcus Kliewer has crafted a uniquely horrific mashup: part home invasion story, part haunted house tale, part cosmic horror epic, part puzzle box.

The novel begins with Eve and her partner Charlie moving into an old house in isolated, rural Oregon. The queer couple are house-flippers, and they haven’t decided if they’re going to renovate or tear down their new acquisition. In the novel’s opening scene, Eve is home alone when there is a knock on the door. To her surprise, a family is on the stoop. The father explains that he used to live in the house, and asks if it would be all right if they came in and took a quick look around. Almost as soon as they enter, though, things begin to go awry…

It’s a genuinely creepy and unsettling story, which has its roots in a car trip Kliewer took 20 years ago. Then eight or nine, and living in Kelowna, in B.C.’s Okanagan

region, he was visiting the Lower Mainland with his family. His father pulled the car over so they could look at a particular house in White Rock, the cosy and popular beach community just south of Vancouver. It was “a house that they had lived in before I was born,” Kliewer explains, when I reach him by Zoom the day before his novel is published. 

“We were just driving past and kind of slowed down to take a look. We weren’t up on the doorstep asking to go inside or anything like that,” he is quick to clarify, “but the current owner came out and asked us what we were doing; and my dad explained that he and my mother used to own the house. They made some small talk and we were about to leave and then the guy was like, ‘Did you ever notice anything weird about the place?’”

It wasn’t the question so much as how it was asked. “There was a reluctance in his eyes and he almost looked embarrassed to be asking. And then he went on to tell us a bunch of creepy ghost stories about the house, and that really stuck with me.”

For Kliewer, 31, who says he always wanted to be a writer, this moment serves as not only a touchstone for his first book but also for his interest in horror. “I had never seen an adult up to that point seem reluctant to tell a ghost story. They always seemed excited, like, ‘Oh, I got this crazy thing that happened to my friend’; but this guy, I could tell, whether or not it was real, he believed he went through something.” 

Eventually, Kliewer began building on that memory. “Around 2020, it sparked into literally the opening scene of the book – the family at the doorstep, somebody answering the door, and then it just kind of railroaded from there.” 

At that time, Kliewer was working as a stop-motion animator, a job that, like so many, dried up with the pandemic. Plus, as he says, “It’s a very up and down industry. Anybody in film will tell you that, whether it’s stop motion or, you know, working on set.” His earlier career, though, set him up nicely for a writing practice. “Stop motion gave me the ability to sit down and focus on one thing for a very long period of time and I was able to apply that mindset into writing.” The pandemic also gave him time – and support, through CERB – to apply that focus to his work. 

Unlike many writers, however, Kliewer didn’t try to find a magazine or an anthology to publish what was then a short story. Instead, he took to the internet, publishing the piece on the r/nosleep subreddit, a forum purportedly devoted to true horror stories (“everything is true here, even if it’s not”), with a readership of, at the time, about 14 million people.

While this might seem like a strange decision, Kliewer is frank about the attractions of the subreddit. “First off, I could post anonymously, and there was such a freedom to that. And there was also immediate feedback, so you could post something and people would be commenting on it right away.” 

The story met with instant acclaim, and caught the attention of Los Angeles-based producer and manager Scott Glassgold, who approached the writer with the possibility of selling the story for film adaptation. “There is the one-part version, which isn’t online anymore. It was just way too dark and I’d wanted to expand it anyway, so I expanded it into a four-part series, which is still on Reddit. The four-part series is much more similar in structure to the novel.” The four-part version was voted the subreddit’s scariest story of the year, and in July 2021, Glassgold sold that version of We Used to Live Here to Netflix – Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively is currently attached to star as Eve. 

To make a strange publication story even stranger, the book rights were sold after the film rights, as part of a three-book deal, before even a single book had been fully written. Film rights for the second book, which will be based on an unpublished story called The Caretaker, have been sold to Universal, with It Girl Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria) attached to star. 

While Kliewer coyly avoided talking about The Caretaker (and wouldn’t talk about his third novel at all), I had to clarify something he had mentioned earlier before I let him go: Had his dad ever experienced anything weird in that house in White Rock?

Kliewer laughs, but just a bit. “He actually found a creepy-looking shrine thing under the stairs when they first moved in,” he says, “with all these ‘cultic’ symbols. He took it out, and I believe he didn’t tell my mother until they moved out,” he says. “He didn’t want to spook her.”

Thankfully, Kliewer is delighted to spook us all.