You’re not even finished moving in yet and someone shows up at your door saying they used to live in your house and they want to look around.
Based on that premise, I thought this was going to be a home invasion story, but it’s more of a ghost/Eldridge horror story.
Yes, it takes a while to get the creepy, invasive family to leave. But it’s once they leave that things really start to go south.
Even before they leave, Eve sees and hears things that don’t make sense.
First, the guy who supposedly lived in the house when he was growing up, Thomas Faust (I can’t believe his last name is Faust! That says it all!) talks about his sister, Alison, but a neighbor claims they weren’t related at all. The “sister” appeared out of the woods one day and the family took her in, only to regret it when she turned on them.
But then Eve finds a journal from “Alison” claiming her “brother” is the intruder. He’s the one who came out of the woods and her family took him in. Then she watched her loving parents turn into completely different people to the point of rejecting her and having her institutionalized.
Her journal says Thomas is “older than the house” maybe even older than the trees in the forest he emerged from.
At one point Eve says he’s not some sort of Eldridge horror, but she doesn’t really know what he is.
The only thing that becomes clear is his ability to bend space and time.
SPOILER ALERT🚨
The book ends with Eve in an alternate reality in which she is the intruder’s sister, named Emma and her partner, Charlie, broke up with her a while back. When she tries to assert her real name, no one has any records of anyone by that name.
The very end of the book is Charlie (Eve’s Charlie) looking for her after she disappeared, but no one has any recollection or records of anyone by that name.
The chapters are interspersed with police reports, internet conspiracies, and other reports of super weird things going on in and around the house.
The only thing missing is a record of when the house was built. That history has to be relevant, especially if the intruder really is “older than the house.”