{"id":5727,"date":"2026-03-04T06:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T06:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=5727"},"modified":"2026-03-04T06:05:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T06:05:00","slug":"the-caretaker-by-marcus-kliewer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=5727","title":{"rendered":"The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Format:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/booknookbuzz.com\/reviews\/formats\/arc\/\">ARC<\/a> <br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/4aXnorn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Buy on Amazon<\/a> <br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/review\/show\/8133299519\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Goodreads<\/a> <\/p>\n<p class=\"\">Just know this book is going to haunt me. I will be thinking about it for a while.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">And also? READ THIS. Because I need to discuss it with someone immediately.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\"><em>The Caretaker<\/em> follows Macy Mullins, who takes a mysterious three-day caretaking job she finds on Craigslist. It feels ominous from the start\u2014like a fisherman\u2019s lure with a barbed hook\u2014and yet she can\u2019t look away. Desperate for money and responsible for helping support her younger sister, Macy convinces herself it\u2019s only three days. Three days in a stranger\u2019s isolated house on the Oregon Coast. What could go wrong?<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">Everything.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">When I started this, I thought it was going to be scarier in a jump-scare, can\u2019t-sleep-with-the-lights-off kind of way. And while it\u2019s definitely creepy and intense, the horror isn\u2019t constant shock value. Instead, it\u2019s slow, atmospheric, and deeply unsettling. The book starts out gradual\u2014we get to know Macy, her motivations, and the strange \u201crites\u201d she\u2019s required to follow. And those rites? They are specific, ritualistic, and wrong in a way you can\u2019t quite name.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">This story feeds off fear and nightmares. It\u2019s the kind of horror that seeps into your brain rather than exploding on the page.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">I\u2019ll admit: I race through books because I have to know what\u2019s really going on. This one is so mind-bending that even after finishing, I had to sit with it. I\u2019m not sure I\u2019m completely satisfied\u2014and I don\u2019t even mean that negatively. It\u2019s complex and disorienting in a way that demands thought. It lingers. It unsettles. It refuses to hand you everything neatly.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">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\u2014the visuals, the rites, the creeping dread would translate so well on screen.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">This is also a book I want to re-read and immediately discuss. There\u2019s so much to unpack, and I need to know how other people interpreted certain moments.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">4.5 stars rounded up to 5.<br \/>Because even if it wasn\u2019t the exact type of horror I expected, it delivered something that stuck with me\u2014and that eerie feeling? It doesn\u2019t let go.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\">Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for this wonderfully creepy eARC. All thoughts and opinions are my own.<\/p>\n<div class=\"ubb-final-rating\"><\/div>\n<p>The post <a href=\"https:\/\/booknookbuzz.com\/the-caretaker-by-marcus-kliewer\/\">The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer<\/a> appeared first on <a href=\"https:\/\/booknookbuzz.com\/\">Book Nook Buzz<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Format: ARC Buy on Amazon Goodreads 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5728,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5727"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5727\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}