Claustrophobic and bizarre, and super creepy! Daniel Kehlmann’s You Should Have Left is a very tightly written and strange horror story.
Our narrator is a screenwriter with a bad case of writer’s block. He’s spending a few days in a rented house in the mountains with this wife and daughter. He’s keeping a notebook of ideas and false starts for his screenplay. Soon, though, weird things start to happen. Strange shadows appear. Things he doesn’t remember writing end up in his notebook. And, as is traditional, the locals are very weird about the house he’s rented and look at him funny when he’s in town.
The first-person format allows you to go crazy right along with our narrator. What is actually going on? Is this all actually happening? Is he truly going crazy? Or is he right, and the house is haunted?
That isn’t quite right. It’s not the house that’s haunted. It’s the place. The very ground where the house is built is just one of those weird, off-kilter places where human beings don’t belong. That idea is a striking one, and kind of reminds me of those creepily weird stories about missing people and staircases in the woods on Reddit.
Read this in one sitting in a quiet room to get the atmosphere and tension just right!
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