Marcus Kliewer's The Caretaker draws heavily from the conventions of creepypasta and online horror communities, particularly the Reddit forum “r/NoSleep.” Founded in 2010, r/NoSleep operates under an “everything is true” rule requiring readers to engage with submissions as though they’re genuine accounts, a convention that collapses the boundary between fiction and testimony. This convention is key to the definition of creepypasta, which uses the interactive qualities of Internet platforms to drive verisimilitude and enhance the dread of a horror story. In the book, Kliewer acknowledges these roots directly, thanking the r/NoSleep and “r/OldHouseArchive” communities for their support of his early career. The lineage of creepypasta shapes the novel’s DNA at every level.

Kliewer’s novel draws most prominently from the “rules horror” subgenre that flourished on r/NoSleep throughout the 2010s, in which protagonists receive a list of bizarre instructions and face escalating consequences for noncompliance. Stories such as “The Left/Right Game” by Jack Townsend, which was later adapted into a podcast, established templates for this format: Cryptic rules are delivered by an authority figure, a skeptical narrator inevitably breaks one, and they then go on to experience a cascading logic of punishment. The Caretaker replicates this architecture precisely through David Carnswel’s VHS instructions and sealed envelopes, with each failed Rite triggering progressively worse consequences. His warning that “the failure of one Rite often triggers the next” mirrors the compounding stakes characteristic of the subgenre (51).

Kliewer also integrates much older horror traditions into this framework. The novel’s central premise, a financially desperate person accepting payment to spend time in a place that others refuse to stay, closely echoes William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill (1959), in which a millionaire offers $10,000 to each guest who can survive a single night in a haunted mansion. Grace Carnswel’s escalating payment structure and Macy Mullin’s inability to refuse mirror this transactional setup, while Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) provides a parallel model of psychological haunting within an isolated estate. David’s Rites similarly borrow from folklore and gothic fiction conventions: sealed letters with secret instructions, thresholds that can’t be recrossed, and entities bound by arbitrary but inviolable rules. By channeling these established horror traditions into a narrative structure with online origins, the novel positions itself at the intersection of longstanding genre conventions and a distinctly contemporary mode of horror storytelling.