The Caretaker (2026) is a supernatural horror novel by Canadian author Marcus Kliewer. The story follows Macy Mullins, a financially desperate 22-year-old who accepts a lucrative but strange house-sitting job on the remote Oregon coast to support herself and her younger sister. The job requires her to follow a set of bizarre, ritualistic rules, or “Rites,” established by the owner’s deceased husband to contain a malevolent entity on the property. The novel explores themes including Grief as Ritual, The Horror of Economic Precarity, and The Fragile Illusion of Control in a Chaotic World.

The Caretaker is Kliewer’s second novel, following his debut, We Used to Live Here (2024), which began as a viral story on Reddit’s “r/NoSleep” forum before being acquired for publication. Kliewer is part of a modern literary trend of authors who have launched successful careers by building an audience on digital storytelling platforms. His work is heavily influenced by the conventions of online “rules horror,” which uses a strict set of instructions to generate psychological suspense. The Caretaker is the first novel to be published by 12:01 Books, a horror imprint created as a joint venture between its publisher and Kliewer’s manager, Scott Glassgold. A film adaptation of The Caretaker is in development.

This guide refers to the 2026 12:01 Books/Atria Books hardcover edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, illness, death, death by suicide, animal cruelty and death, emotional abuse, suicidal ideation and self-harm, mental illness, substance use, and cursing.

Plot Summary

In the Prologue, David Carnswel, an elderly man on the Oregon coast, hears three hollow knocks and follows muddy footprints into the dark woods. David has long followed a set of rules that he calls the “Rites,” which he believes protect humanity from an evil entity confined to his property. He finds a young man in a yellow rain poncho pacing near the property’s roped-off boundary. David calls these strangers “Visitors”; tonight’s is a “Weeper,” whom he must calm and lead back toward the house. The Visitor is a near-perfect copy of David’s son, Caleb, who died young. David tries to coax it away, but the Visitor tells him that Caleb died hating David. It shoves David down and sprints toward the house, joined by dozens of Visitors emerging from the trees. The Prologue ends with a Craigslist ad from Grace Carnswel, David’s wife, seeking a caretaker.

Macy Mullins, the 22-year-old narrator, is a broke college graduate buried in debt. She lives with her 17-year-old sister, Jemma Mullins, in a tiny converted-motel apartment in Salem, Oregon. Macy interviews at Grace’s property on the Oregon coast. Grace reveals that David died three months earlier but made her promise on his deathbed to maintain his upkeep routines for the property. She needs someone to continue them for a weekend while she visits her granddaughter in Florida. Grace characterizes David’s beliefs as “superstitious nonsense” but offers up to $9,000. Macy accepts and receives a VHS tape that David recorded.

Macy and Jemma watch the tape using a VCR from their storage closet, surrounded by boxes of their late father’s belongings. Their father ran a lawn-care business called Mullins Mowing before dying three years earlier when his truck plunged into the Willamette River. On the tape, David outlines three rules. All main- and second-floor lights must stay off between three and four o’clock in the morning; no light can remain on longer than three minutes. If a rabbit enters the house, it must be caught and released within 10 minutes. If anyone with cold blue eyes knocks between six o’clock in the evening and six o’clock in the morning, Macy must hide and never let them in. David warns that once someone steps onto the property as its caretaker, they can’t quit until someone else takes over. Failure to maintain the Rites will cause a blood-red sun to rise, spreading the entity beyond the property. Each rule has a sealed contingency envelope. Jemma begs Macy not to go. Macy, facing eviction and overwhelming debt, decides to take the job.

Grace departs after touring Macy around the property. Macy is unsettled when the lights switch on by themselves, provoking her compulsive urges to turn them off. On a walk, she meets Lucy, a woman who was once the Carnswels’ house cleaner; she was fired after she slept through the “witching hour.”

That night, Macy discovers that a storage-closet light exceeded the three-minute limit by seven seconds. She opens the contingency envelope, which warns of a “moderate setback” within 24 hours. The setback arrives when Macy’s father’s insurance broker calls to say that the company is denying the life-insurance payout, claiming evidence that her father died by suicide. He also reveals a previous suicide attempt that Macy never knew about. While processing this news, Macy spots a brown rabbit inside the house. Her timer expires before she can catch it. The next contingency letter instructs her to burn the rabbit alive, calling it a “construct” of the entity, and warns that refusal will bring a “devastating setback,” more Visitors, and harsher rules. Macy refuses and releases the rabbit.

A Visitor resembling Lucy appears at the door. Macy hides until it leaves and then decides to abandon the property. On the drive toward Salem, she is struck by horrific visions of a blood-red sun and Jemma’s lifeless body. She tells the driver to turn back. Back at the house, she answers a call on the rotary phone and receives instructions: Follow the Visitor’s footprints into the woods, find whoever waits, and prevent them from crossing the property line. Macy tracks the prints through a storm and finds the Visitor resembling Lucy, now with pale blue eyes, searching for her friend Zee. When the Visitor suddenly goes blank and whispers, “Macy Mullins, I know you” (208), it bolts toward the house. Macy chases it through the dark, surrounded by dozens of Visitors, and tackles it on the front steps. It kicks her in the face, and she blacks out.

Macy wakes to find the Visitor locked in the study. She receives new instructions to keep all lights on, rehang any fallen picture within one minute, and keep her heart rate below 150 beats per minute. For hours, lights snap off and pictures fall in waves. The Visitor speaks in Jemma’s voice, mimicking an asthma attack, and then turns accusatory. It taunts Macy over her deepest secret: Approximately a year after her father’s death, she attempted suicide, taking sleeping pills and tying a plastic bag over her head. She survived because she didn’t take enough pills and the bag ripped. The voice screams that she’s a “WASTE of a human being” (232). Macy’s heart rate spikes past 150; every bulb shatters, and every frame falls. Macy then receives instructions permitting her to fight back. The Visitor, now a towering figure, hunts Macy room by room. Cornered in the basement, she manages to stab it until it stops moving. At dawn, the sun rises golden-white.

The next day, Macy cleans the house, repairs the lawn mower, and mows the overgrown property. That evening, she scrolls through old photos and, for the first time since her father’s death, cries tears of sadness rather than rage. A white rabbit appears and escapes into the basement before she can burn it. Soon after, a Visitor appears at the door, claiming that its truck broke down. Macy recognizes it as her father’s voice. She sees that the Visitor is a perfect copy of her father in the clothes he wore the night he died, with pale blue eyes. It pleads with Macy to run even as its hands involuntarily try to force the door open. Macy opens the final contingency envelope, which directs her to the basement. There, a TV plays instructions from David, who explains that the Visitor has taken the form of someone the caretaker lost. She must now kill it.

An intruder bursts through the basement door. Macy swings the VCR and strikes it in the head. The figure falls. Macy tears off its glasses, expecting pale blue eyes, but they’re hazel, the same as her father’s and Jemma’s. Macy soon realizes that this intruder may be the real Jemma after seeing that Jemma attempted to contact her to say that she was coming. She fails to revive Jemma. Upstairs, Macy confirms that the Dad-Visitor never entered; its boot prints lead away from the locked patio door. Jemma came in through an open window.

The foyer light turns on by itself, marking the final Rite. Macy reaches for the switch but stops. She resigns her responsibility over the house. She walks through the woods to a nearby cliff and stands at the edge, where the tightness in her chest dissolves for the first time in years. Just before she steps off, her phone buzzes: The real Jemma is alive. She’s almost at the Carnswel house and has called 911; the body in the basement was another Visitor construct. Relief floods through Macy, but as she listens to her sister’s voice, the white sun turns red.