"I don't think anyone is comfortable with the unknown"

Marcus Kliewer on getting discovered on Reddit, why it's important to share your writing (even when it makes you uncomfortable), and what we really fear.

Dear friends,

Considering that this newsletter is called “Ghost Stories,” there hasn’t been a lot of horror featured here. (For an explanation of why I chose this name, click here.) To be honest, despite my interest in Shirley Jackson, I don’t often read horror. With the exception of the greatest—The Haunting of Hill House, The Turn of the Screw, and a very few others—I find that most of it tends to turn away just when things get interesting, using gore to deflect from the emotions that are at the root of what we fear.

But We Used to Live Here, by debut novelist Marcus Kliewer, checks all my boxes: female protagonist, haunted house, and totally original approach. It starts with a familiar-enough premise: the protagonist, Eve, is home alone one night when there’s a knock at the door. A man standing outside, with his wife and kids, says he grew up in the house and just wants to look around. What unspools is something in the tradition of “found horror” like The Blair Witch Project, updated for the Internet era. It’s so smart and absorbing that I missed my stop on the subway while reading it … for the second time.

I spoke over Zoom with Marcus, who lives in Vancouver, about his religious upbringing, his advice for other writers, the role of LGBTQ characters in horror, and more. Below is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

Marcus Kliewer, author of WE USED TO LIVE HERE. Photo by Brian van Wyk.

Tell me about the unusual genesis of your book.

The Subreddit nosleep first came to my attention a decade ago. I’d taken a stab at writing a few stories back then and they did all right. But life happened, and about six years went by when I didn’t write there.

Then Covid hit. Up here in Canada, we had a benefit called CERB, which gave people $2000 a month for unemployment due to Covid effects. Around the same time, I saw a news article come out about these Hollywood producers who found a story on nosleep and sold it to Netflix for a bunch of money. I thought, Hey, maybe I should start writing on there again. My goal, doing that, was to try to make enough income to survive. But in the back of my mind, I’m thinking that maybe these Hollywood producers will reach out to me. It seemed like a one-in-a-billion chance. But sure enough, three months into writing, that’s exactly what happened. And now I’m sitting here still kind of whiplashed from the whole experience but very grateful.

Speaking for myself, Covid was a time when things that had been hidden came to the surface. Was there anything about the circumstances of that year that made you turn back to writing horror?

That was probably the worst year of my life. If it wasn’t for that $2000 a month, and the support of my family, I might not have made it through. I’ve said it before, but the only thing I could do to cope during that period was to take all my anxieties and put them into something controllable, which was words on the page. I was thinking: these are the things that terrify me, these are the flaws in myself that I see. How can I get it out and therapeutically process it?

Did you have an interest in haunted house stories before you wrote this one?

My parents had a house before I was born, out in a small beach town called White Rock here in the Pacific Northwest of Canada. We were driving past it and the current owner was outside washing his car. I must have been eight or nine at the time. He saw us looking at his house and meandered over, and my dad explained that they used to live in this house. We were about to leave when the guy kind of reluctantly asked if they’d ever noticed anything weird in the house.

There’s a moment in the book that’s very similar to this, and it was asked in pretty much the same way. The character in the book, like the man we met, isn’t excited to ask it. He’s embarrassed, ashamed almost. The man was asking to get validation, is how I read it as a kid. That really creeped me out. Whether they’re telling a story about angels or demon possession or something, every adult I’d seen up until that point was always excited about it. They’d be like, “Oh man, there’s this crazy story I’ve got to tell you.” This guy wasn’t anything like that. That stuck in my head forever.

How did your parents react?

My dad said he never saw anything, which now I know was a lie.

Did you have any formative experiences of watching horror movies or reading horror novels?

From a very young age I was always fascinated by horror in general. I was brought up religious, and I wasn’t allowed to watch horror movies, so I became obsessed with them. I started watching horror movies at friends’ houses or reading the plot summaries online. I would go to a Christian movie review website for parents to read to see if a movie was going to be OK for their kid. At the bottom of each review they would describe every horrific thing that happened in the movie. So if it was a Saw movie, it would be like, “Somebody cuts off their leg in this scene. Somebody gets stabbed in the eye.” I’d get to experience all the most extreme scary parts of the movie. And then I lived vicariously through friends who would tell me about it.

The very first horror movie I watched was the first Saw movie. Me and my buddy, his parents had an old trailer in the backyard, and we snuck a portable DVD player out there.

Something that brings your book to the next level—in terms of creativity, but also its impact—are all the trappings of reality that you place around the story through the documentation. I’m curious whether that was part of your vision from the beginning or if you threaded them through later.

I’ve always toyed with hiding Morse code in my stories on Reddit. It was one of the first things people would comment about. They’d try to figure out what it meant and all that.  With the book, we’re in Eve’s head the entire time, with the exception of those documents. It’s a way to provide a breather from that. And then also both confuse the reader a little bit more and add context.

The “Old House Map” from WE USED TO LIVE HERE—one of the documents Kliewer uses to add an element of realism to the novel.

On Reddit, you’ve been very generous with advice for other writers. What are some of the most useful things you tell people who are trying to break into fiction writing?

There’s a saying that you need to allow yourself a shitty first draft. But I’d take it even further and say, Allow yourself to write a shitty story and put it out into the world. There’s always going to be a voice in my head saying, This is terrible, this is cringe, no one’s ever going to talk to you again if you put this out there. I had to say, you know what? I’m going to put a story out anyway. Obviously, work hard on it and make it as good as you can, but accepting the possibility of failure was healthy. I didn’t write on nosleep for ten years because I thought, What if nobody likes it? It wasn’t till I was at such a low point that I just needed to get something out there that things started happening.

There’s a cliché that everyone has a novel in their drawer. Most people keep it in the drawer and don’t put it online for everybody to read. Why is it important to share your work publicly?

Even if it doesn’t change your life, it’s infinitely better than never putting it out there and having to wonder at the end of your life, what if you had. With writing especially, there’s such a low overhead cost. You don’t even need a laptop. You can use a computer at a library. There’s almost no downside to at least trying.

You chose a queer female character as your protagonist. There’s been a lot of interest in the way certain characters might be coded as queer in Shirley Jackson’s writing. Were you consciously setting yourself in that tradition?

Obviously I’m heavily influenced by her work, as is anybody who writes in this genre. [Editor’s note: Obviously!] But it wasn’t something I planned. In the earliest versions of this story, it was one of the first things established about the main character. I needed an excuse for the character not to want the family to come in and it just popped out: Not tonight, my girlfriend’s coming home soon. From that immediately, there’s conflict. Growing up in a religious environment, you get everything from Westboro Baptist Church types to “Hate the sin, not the sinner” and everything in between. All sexuality outside of “man, woman, marriage” is demonized within that environment. It was a very scary place to explore my own sexuality.  

The horror genre feels like a natural place to be manifesting the anxiety that these characters are experiencing as a result of their clash with mainstream social forces.

There are two different ideas of what a family is in the novel. Eve and her girlfriend is one idea of a family. The family that shows up is a very traditional nuclear idea of a family. There’s a lot of energy in that—some of it good, a lot of it bad.

No spoilers, but the whole premise of your story questions the idea of the family as inherently stable. Down to the identity of the characters who make up that family.

Yes. Exactly.

Reading some of the responses to your book online, I was interested that there’s a split between people who think that Eve is mentally ill and those who are looking for a supernatural explanation for the things that take place—the same critical debate that exists around The Haunting of Hill House.

I am surprised by that reaction. The author’s intent doesn’t matter overall—people can have their theories—but I had always intended to make it as clear as possible, with maybe a little wiggle room of doubt, that what happened to Eve was external and not mental illness. As someone who’s been in psych wards myself, one regret I have with the book, which I hope to amend in the future, is to emphasize that most people living with mental illness are much more likely to be victims of violence than to be perpetrators of it. I don’t want to take away from the fun of the theories, but I really want people to know that this wasn’t supposed to be an accurate representation of schizophrenia or anything like that.

Of course, whenever people see ghosts, in real life or in a story, you have to explore the mental-illness aspect of it. Most people understood what I was doing and that I was coming from a place of empathy and care. But I don’t want people who are living with those illnesses to feel stigmatized.

Why do you think people are attracted to horror as a genre? What are we looking for when we read horror novels?

Some people just want to have fun. It’s like you’re going hunting, you hear a branch snap, you think it’s a bear and a rabbit jumps out. And you all laugh as a group.

I think for some people it’s also therapeutic. A way to purge. You can experience these feelings in a way that’s safe and it’s not going to physically harm you. There can be a lot of power in that. But it’s definitely not for everybody.

Do you think there’s something universal that people are afraid of?

I don’t think anyone is comfortable with the unknown. If we hear a bang at night, it’s hard-baked into our brain stems to want to know what’s causing that bang. You’ve never heard that bang in your house before. It’s coming from the kitchen. You go down there and there’s nothing in the kitchen. Even if you go back to sleep, it’s going to be on your mind the next day. And if it happens again—the more it happens, the more you’re going to want to know.

Where I’ll be

Starting this week, I’m teaching a new course via 92Y’s Roundtable lecture series on Shirley Jackson’s early novels. Here’s the schedule:

October 9: The Road Through the Wall

October 16: Hangsaman

October 23: The Bird’s Nest

All classes are at 1 p.m. Eastern. Sign up individually or for the whole series!

Israeli/Palestinian authors reading group

I’m hearing that some of you are making better progress with Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian than I have so far. How about we aim to discuss this one starting in early November? I was trying to read the Kindle version, but that doesn’t seem to be working for me—I guess I’ll have to try on paper.

As ever,

Ruth