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.
