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Just know this book is going to haunt me. I will be thinking about it for a while.
And also? READ THIS. Because I need to discuss it with someone immediately.
The Caretaker follows Macy Mullins, who takes a mysterious three-day caretaking job she finds on Craigslist. It feels ominous from the start—like a fisherman’s lure with a barbed hook—and yet she can’t look away. Desperate for money and responsible for helping support her younger sister, Macy convinces herself it’s only three days. Three days in a stranger’s isolated house on the Oregon Coast. What could go wrong?
Everything.
When I started this, I thought it was going to be scarier in a jump-scare, can’t-sleep-with-the-lights-off kind of way. And while it’s definitely creepy and intense, the horror isn’t constant shock value. Instead, it’s slow, atmospheric, and deeply unsettling. The book starts out gradual—we get to know Macy, her motivations, and the strange “rites” she’s required to follow. And those rites? They are specific, ritualistic, and wrong in a way you can’t quite name.
This story feeds off fear and nightmares. It’s the kind of horror that seeps into your brain rather than exploding on the page.
I’ll admit: I race through books because I have to know what’s really going on. This one is so mind-bending that even after finishing, I had to sit with it. I’m not sure I’m completely satisfied—and I don’t even mean that negatively. It’s complex and disorienting in a way that demands thought. It lingers. It unsettles. It refuses to hand you everything neatly.
The atmosphere is dark, heavy, and haunting. The Oregon Coast setting adds so much to that isolated, otherworldly feeling. This is absolutely one I can see being adapted into a movie—the visuals, the rites, the creeping dread would translate so well on screen.
This is also a book I want to re-read and immediately discuss. There’s so much to unpack, and I need to know how other people interpreted certain moments.
4.5 stars rounded up to 5.
Because even if it wasn’t the exact type of horror I expected, it delivered something that stuck with me—and that eerie feeling? It doesn’t let go.
Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for this wonderfully creepy eARC. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
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