Review: The Caretaker

The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

My friend, when he came back from Canada, bought this book at YVR Airport and recommended it highly. It seemed like it'd be perfect for me too, so I bought a copy from B&N - half price after working in my membership discount, 20% off, plus a $5 reward. After reading it, though? I'm glad I didn't pay full price, because as much as it looked like my kind of book, it really, really wasn't.

To be fair, the author includes a content warning about how much this book doesn't sugarcoat its dealings in mental illness - depression, OCD, suicide. He indicates in the acknowledgments too that he's got some history with these issues himself. And yet, his execution of this book, as an allegory for mental illness, crosses into outright offensive territory for numerous reasons.

A lot of other readers hated Macy, the protagonist, thinking she was just a whiny twentysomething with no redeeming qualities. I bet a lot of those same people hated the new Supergirl movie too. Honestly, I think the main reason I didn't DNF this one was Macy herself, because I cared about her and I wanted her to have a win for once in her life. Don't you just love it, though, when the author is bound and determined to make the protagonist lose everything? /s

But for me, the idea of Macy having to follow a string of complicated "Rites" in her three days of duties as caretaker for the Carnswel estate, all to stave off a theoretical apocalypse...it tries to be high stakes, but also "all in your head, Macy," and the constant changing of these allegedly ironclad rules causes the book to make less and less sense as it goes on. Ultimately, it builds to an extremely abrupt ending - like Kane Parsons's Backrooms movie, but worse, as it leaves almost every story thread hanging with no resolution.

Between that, plus the book's general tone of "mentally ill people are useless and stupid and their very existence is harmful to everyone else, so they should have no choice but to be driven to suicide" (one of the reasons why I absolutely hated the movie Obsession, on top of it unforgivably presenting an autistic-coded protagonist who willfully rapes a woman), I don't think I'll be reading anything else by this author anytime soon.

But I would watch a movie adaptation if the right people were in charge of it. Like, for instance, the Shyamalan family. M. Night Shyamalan's Knock at the Cabin and Ishana Night Shyamalan's The Watchers both elevated their respective source materials, especially by offering a (bittersweet) ending that actually resolves things much better.

(Of course, the Shyamalans probably wouldn't be involved since they already covered similar thematic ground in Servant, so...)

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