Marcus Kliewer’s 2026 novel, The Caretaker, in true horror fashion, begins with a prologue. A man (David) is trying desperately to follow “the Rites” in order to ward off a “Visitor” who looks just like his dead son but isn’t. He fails. Then we cut to Macy Mullins, our twenty-something protagonist – and the story becomes hers. Indeed, one of the very many good things about The Caretaker is Macy Mullins, a character expertly drawn whom we can’t help but care about, despite her own conviction that nobody will.
Macy is looking after not only herself but her teenage sister, Gemma, in the wake of their father’s death in a car accident. Three years later, his daughters are struggling to come to terms with their grief – and, indeed, to get by at all. Without a job, with no money, and accumulating eviction notices, Macy answers a strange ad for a caretaker for an elderly man – only three days of work. She takes the job even after a still stranger interview where she discovers the elderly man in question is apparently dead and what she is really being asked to do is stay by herself in the house and follow a bizarre sequence of “routines.” Desperate, she agrees. (And who wouldn’t take $9000 for three days’ work?) The novel follows Macy over those three days.
In a VHS tape he leaves for the person who takes the role of Caretaker over from him, David explains that there is an “entity” at 5637 Brookview Heights, and that the Rites are designed to suppress them. Failure to follow the Rites will have increasingly dire effects, leading to apparent global apocalypse. Of course, Macy doesn’t believe any of it is true, but once she’s alone in the house, the things David describes do start to happen: lights go on and off, rabbits appear, people knock on the door, the old 1960s rotary phone rings. Macy is thus compelled to start enacting the Rites, all the time still not quite believing in any of it.
In the layered stories of David and Macy – however briefly we see David – The Caretaker does make it clear that while the Rites may from one perspective seem to be empty actions, with no discernible inherent meaning (why rabbits?), they are also material enactments of the effects of grief. The most important thing we learn about David in the prologue is that he lost his son, possibly to suicide. Macy lost her father, also possibly to suicide. The Rites clearly double as the effects of traumatic loss and guilt – manifestations of trying to cope with all of that, or, rather, manifestations of failing to cope. As David said in the tape he leaves behind: “Each time you mess up one of these Rites, things will get significantly harder. The presence, specter, entity – whatever name you prefer – this thing is vicious. Relentless” (53). Both David and Macy inevitably “mess up,” spiraling down – because that’s what they were already doing.
Since this part screamed folk horror, I underlined it (p. 93)
I was absolutely compelled by this novel, which I read in only two sittings. Macy is a great character, and I loved her relationship with her sister Gemma (and I loved Gemma). What happens in the house and the Rites Macy has to perform are just weird – and I definitely wanted to find out what it all meant. It’s also fine that I’m not entirely sure. There are hints in the novel that the “entity” is real – ancient – as are the Rites designed to contain it. In this, The Caretaker dips into folk horror (I could say a lot more about that!). But it’s also a very real psychological depiction of the manifestation of grief.
And hanging over the novel is the question of whether the consequences of failing to perform the Rites correctly will indeed end in world-wide devastation. In this, The Caretaker evokes Paul Tremblay’s recent novel, The Cabin at the End of the World (2018), which I also liked. Both novels put characters in dire situations where they’re compelled to do things they don’t want to do – would never want to do (perform sacrifice, for instance) – in order to save an ineffable humanity, a threat they find inconceivable. (Maybe Drew Goddard’s 2012 Cabin in the Woods did this first?) While the quite different endings of both Tremblay’s novel and M. Night Shyamalan’s 2023 adaptation, Knock at the Cabin, received mixed reviews, I would say that the ending of Kliewer’s The Caretaker is absolutely spot on. If nothing else, you need to keep reading just for that.
The Caretaker already has an adaptation in the works from Universal Pictures, starring and produced by Sydney Sweeney. Shall we just say that Sweeney does not seem like the obvious choice to play Marcy (I’d have gone for Mia Goth – and Jenna Ortega as Gemma), but I’ll hold judgment until I see it; it’ll be a test of how talented an actor Sweeney really is. David Bruckner is directing – and I thought his 2017 adaptation of Adam Nevill’s 2011 novel The Ritual was excellent, so that certainly gives me hope. Indeed, the principal change Bruckner made in adapting Nevill’s novel was to brilliantly integrate grief into its folk horror plot – to give the four hikers lost in the Swedish forest a recently murdered friend, and to make one of the four feel devastatingly culpable for that death. Bruckner seems well poised, then, to adapt Kliewer’s The Caretaker.
Obviously, I’m not going into details here, but when Bruckner adapts The Caretaker for the screen, he and the screenwriter will have more than one critical decision to make about what happens in the last two pages. If nothing else, these brilliant last two pages, which are packed with dread, and the kind of ambiguity that satisfies rather than frustrates, mark Kliewer as a truly important horror writer. However the film chooses to interpret this ending could be good – and I for one will be watching to find out what they do.
Needless to say, I have already ordered Kliewer’s first novel, We Used to Live Here (2024). The Caretaker is part of the new horror imprint – 12:01 Books – from Atria (Simon and Schuster) – so watch out for more books from them.
