In Marcus Kliewer’s The Caretaker, grief is depicted as a form of vulnerability, making it attractive to predatory forces that thrive on the exploitation of other people’s pain. In response, the novel explores how individuals attempt to manage their grief through the creation of rigid, obsessive rituals. David Carnswel’s elaborate system of the Rites serves as a complex coping mechanism, designed to impose order on the chaos of his unprocessed grief over his son’s death. Through the contrasting experiences of David and his successor, Macy Mullins, the novel argues that such containment is ultimately inadequate as a form of defense. True resilience against the entity that haunts the property requires the caretaker to undergo the cathartic and courageous act of confronting their grief directly.

David’s Rites function as a psychological fortress built to keep his own devastating emotions at bay. His grief over his son, Caleb, is the foundational trauma that the entity exploits, yet David never addresses it head-on. Instead, he channels his pain into a set of meticulous, all-consuming tasks that give him a sense of purpose and control. This impulse is evident in his habit of naming malevolent things, like a spot of melanoma he called “Frank,” in order to give them “a shape, gave them a place in his mind to settle” (xv). The Rites are the ultimate extension of this behavior, transforming his amorphous grief into a tangible enemy with predictable rules. By reframing his psychological battle as a fight for the “survival of humanity” (xiii), he elevates his personal pain into a cosmic struggle, allowing him to endlessly perform his rituals without ever having to touch the raw nerve of his loss.

The supernatural entity’s power is directly proportional to this unaddressed pain, and its attacks are surgical in their cruelty. It manifests in forms specifically chosen to exploit its victims’ deepest traumas. For David, the Visitor takes the form of Caleb and weaponizes David’s most profound fear: that his son died hating him. The Visitor uses this fear to taunt and fracture the careful defenses that David has constructed. Similarly, when tormenting Macy, the entity uses the voices of her sister and herself to dredge up her guilt surrounding her father’s death and her own suicide attempt at the Hawthorne Hotel. It sneers, “I know you tried to leave me, Macy, just like Mom walked out, just like Dad drove into a fucking river” (231), demonstrating a consistent strategy of targeting its victims’ biggest vulnerabilities.

Ultimately, the novel contrasts David’s strategy of containment with Macy’s gradual but painful path toward catharsis. David remains trapped in a reactive cycle, his rituals only serving to manage symptoms rather than cure the disease. Macy, however, after systematically confronting the entity’s threats, finds a different way forward. Following a night of intense trauma, she is drawn to mowing the lawn, an activity she associates with her late father. This act leads her to look at old family photos and cry for the first time in three years. The narrative presents this emotional release as genuinely healing, describing it as “cathartic—disinfectant to a wound that had been open for the last three years” (260). This moment suggests that while rituals may offer temporary structure, one develops true strength when they gain the courage to address their emotional wounds.