You Shouldn't Have Come Here

“This was the awkward part of hosting guests. I never knew if they wanted me to stay and chat or leave them alone. I was sure Grace was the latter but I was already drawn to her like a moth to a flame or them damn coyotes to my chickens, so anything I could do to buy more time with her, I would.

We had more in common than she knew. I too had to keep busy. Idle hands, as they say, are the devil’s workshop.”

This quote, with Calvin trying not to seem overeager for Grace’s attention, operates on two levels. For most of the novel, he seems like an innocent country boy falling for a city girl. However, his framing of himself as both a moth and coyote implies a prey-predator dynamic—with Grace being revealed as the ultimate predator.

“Every year, I close my eyes and throw a dart at the map of the United States. Wherever it lands, that’s where I go for vacation. […]

My life is very routine everything is planned and planned again every minute of my day is scheduled. This gives me freedom in a way.”

Later, Calvin muses on whether or not withholding truth is tantamount to lying. Here, Grace honestly explains her method of choosing annual vacations, but these “retreats” involve murder—a way for her to escape her mundane life as a “banker,” wife, and mother.

“‘You like bees or something?’

‘Yeah. They’re fascinating. […] When a honeybee stings, their stinger gets lodged in the skin, so they have to self-amputate their digestive tract, muscles, and nerves. They literally die protecting themselves.’”

Grace often acts against her assumed city-girl innocence: She helps Calvin deal with dead chickens, composes herself after falling into a pit of dead animals, and describes honeybee death as poetic. This description foreshadows both her nightmare of evisceration and personal history of killing.

“I was drawn to Grace. We were from very different worlds, but deep down, I felt like we were alike in some way—not sure which, but I knew we were. And I think she liked my world.”

Calvin’s intuition mirrors Grace’s, as each senses the other’s predatory nature. Early on, his “world” seems to refer to the Wyoming countryside, but is ultimately revealed to be the world of serial killers.

“Calvin looked at me like I was the only girl he had ever seen, and I liked it. It was that dance at the beginning of a relationship—intoxicating, addicting. You just couldn’t get enough, until you could. It was probably why I had had so many of them. Every relationship eventually loses its luster. You get bored. It becomes routine, mundane. And then you find yourself seeking that excitement and spark elsewhere.”

Grace’s reflection on past relationships implies she seeks flings as a single, professional woman. Later, this habit is revealed to be flings with targets before killing them.

“My mind kept going back to that feeling I had in the pit of my stomach—the one that tells you something is very wrong. To the lemon of a car sitting outside. The lack of cell phone service and Wi-Fi. The rotting pit of animals at the end of the driveway. The scream I heard last night. I heard it, right?”

Within three days, Grace’s stay at Calvin’s ranch devolves into a nightmare. She notes most Airbnb guests would have checked out by now, but because her car is broken down and she lacks communication, she feels cornered.

“I knew then he hadn’t completely shut me out. I could salvage this and enjoy the rest of my time here. The most pleasurable things in life are temporary. Most people don’t understand that. They want to drag it out and make it last a lifetime. I could tell Calvin was like most people. He needed forever, but I just needed right now.”

Grace often comments on her distinct nature from others, particularly Calvin: While he struggles to make her invested in him, she plans a fling. This quote foreshadows their respective intentions: He intends to add her to his collection of deceased guests, and she plans to kill him on her last day at the ranch.

“He was right. We all did have bad dreams, but I always believed they were warnings, the subconscious trying its best to alert you that something in your waking world was amiss.”

Grace’s reflection comes as she and Calvin discuss the second of her three nightmares. She dreams of his taxidermized animals attacking her, which foreshadows two deadly realities: She is nearly attacked by a mountain lion and later learns Calvin intends to keep her as a trophy, like his taxidermized animals.

“‘Did you talk to your brother about my car?’ I asked.

My mind kept going back to that. There was nothing worse than feeling stuck. The mounted animals reminded me of that. Actually, I didn’t feel stuck—I was stuck, just like them. Maybe that was the warning.”

As Calvin works to gain Grace’s trust and keep her at the ranch, various characters and events leave her feeling cornered. She continually asks him to get someone to fix her car, which results in repeated delays. It is only on her penultimate day that he says repairs are complete—as the delays were intended.

“Grace drank the rest of her beer in one swig and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The girl I met five days ago wasn’t the girl I was seeing right now. She was like a chameleon, fitting in with whatever backdrop she happened to be part of. I liked it but it left me wondering who the real Grace was.”

The novel fleshes out Calvin, his family, and friends. By contrast, while Grace is a co-narrator, she never reveals her true self. Calvin finds her mysterious nature alluring, only enhancing his desire for a long-term relationship. Upon dying, he wonders how she could have turned the tables on him.

“I turned to see Grace pull away from Joe and then give him a hard push. I couldn’t hear what they were saying over the music. He looked stunned, and he stumbled back toward her, closing the new distance between them. Grace slapped him right across the face, leaving a red mark where her hand connected with his skin.”

Calvin’s younger brother Joe often serves as a scapegoat, especially when drunk. Here, Grace’s slap implies he offended or assaulted her, resulting in Calvin punching him. Later, she reveals she staged the slap to evoke sympathy.

“Grace was all I wanted and all I needed. She was everything between the sun rising in the sun setting. She was the sensation you get after you felt a jerk on your fishing pole (literally). She was the smell of coffee and the burn of whiskey. She was a hard day’s work and a well-earned lazy Sunday. She was a garden full of ripe vegetables and a field of overgrown grass. She was everything and she was nothing, which made her the perfect amount of something. I couldn’t get enough of her.”

Rose reveals the depths of Calvin’s obsession with Grace, portraying it as childish and ignorant. This obsession confirms Betty, Joe, and his own admission that he falls too deeply too quickly, thus resulting in relationships that do not last. In reality, he kills the objects of his obsession.

“Betty’s neck and hands were covered in red splotches. There was a slight jelly glisten over each mark where Charlotte had rubbed Neosporin. I felt like this whole town had Neosporin rubbed over it—something to conceal it, make it feel better, look better—but beneath the jelly glisten, there was irritation, pain, maybe even venom.”

Calvin’s surrogate mother Betty receives stings while checking her beehives, which Charlotte treats with Neosporin. As Grace observes the sight, she views Betty as symbolic of the community. In her brief time in Dubois, Wyoming, she perceives unresolved longing.

“‘You know what. In four days, you’ll be gone, and I’ll still be here.’ She raised her chin and smirked.

‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that.’

Charlotte let out a huff. […] She stomped across the kitchen and threw open the sliding door. Before exiting, she turned and looked at me. ‘I hope Joe keeps you here permanently.’”

In every exchange with rival suitor Charlotte, Grace calmly bests her, in part because both know Calvin prefers her. Charlotte implies Joe is a danger to Grace, due to him being framed for the death of Calvin’s girlfriend Lisa. Ultimately, this exchange is a red herring for Calvin’s murders.

“‘Not to sound cliche, but I think I can get her to stay.’ I immediately regretted the words as they left my mouth. […]

I knew Grace wanted me. And I wanted her. And at the end of the day, there was nothing complicated about that.

‘What are you going to do? Lock her in the basement?’ Joe chuckled.

‘I got an extra set of handcuffs,’ Wyatt teased.

Shaking my head, I laughed with them but it was forced because I was dead serious.”

When Calvin talks to Joe and Wyatt about Grace’s imminent departure, he vows to get her to stay. This puzzles the other men, who joke about him doing so physically. Readers are meant to assume Calvin regrets this vow because it reveals how deeply he feels about Grace, but in reality, he regrets implicating himself, even if jokingly.

“I took a deep breath. Calvin was right about one thing: we only had a few more days left, he only had a few more days left…and then I would leave all of this behind me.”

As Grace’s 10-day vacation comes to a close, her growing anxiety about the ranch and Calvin’s growing obsession with her create suspense. When she remarks he “only had a few more days left,” she means she has a limited timeframe to kill him without being caught.

“In the living room, I walked to the bookshelf Calvin had pointed out on the day I arrived. He said he loved to read, but I realized I hadn’t seen him pick up a book once in the past week, […] A piece of paper fell to the floor. I bent down and picked it up. It was a receipt from a bookstore dated two days before I arrived. […] I let out a sigh and, and my eyes flicked back to the bookshelf. It was all a lie, like Calvin had designed a set for my arrival.”

The longer Grace remains at the ranch, the more of Calvin’s deceit she uncovers. When she confronts him about his lies, he confesses to wanting to impress her with a cultured persona. This discovery is ironic, as Grace’s very name is a lie.

“If this was what she needed to feel safe, I’d give it to her. That was the thing about safety, you could either have it or feel like you had it, and they were the same thing—until they weren’t. Finally, she took it, clutching the key in her hand. I’m sure it felt comforting, like a security blanket does for a young child.”

Calvin reflects on a basic tenet of human comfort: If a trusted authority assures individuals that they are safe, they will stop worrying, whether they are truly safe of not. He hints at having lulled Grace into a false sense of security, as she later discovers he installed her lock backward, making her room a trap.

“After Calvin left, I laid in bed for a while thinking about how I could get through the next two days. I still had a soft spot for him but I was trying to harden that area because I knew something wasn’t right with Calvin, maybe that’s why I was captivated by him. Broken people were drawn to broken people.”

Grace decides to leave the ranch, and ruminates on how to hold Calvin at arm’s length until then. Her “soft spot for him” is not romantic, but rather acknowledgement of a fellow manipulator. She is intrigued by their solidarity, but pushes it aside to eliminate him.

“I nearly screamed when I saw the ghostly figure standing in front of the house, dressed in a long white nightgown. It was dark out, and it took a few seconds to realize it was Betty. […]

‘The house is evil. It infects everyone,’ she said just above a whisper. ‘Nothing good happens here.’ […]

She didn’t react. She just continued whispering. ‘You shouldn’t have come here because now I’m not sure you’ll be able to leave.’”

This is the second of four instances of characters namedropping the title of the novel. Betty, who views Calvin as her son, comes to the ranch in the middle of an emotional episode to proclaim the place is evil. Like Joe, who once claimed he was saving Grace from Calvin, Betty implies she knows of Calvin’s murders.

“The more time I spent with Grace, the less I seem to know about her. She was a peculiar woman, and she was clearly hiding something. I suppose we all were. But living alone on a ranch with only animals to talk to, you learn what the animal will do before it does it. And at the core, we’re all animals.”

Calvin reiterates Grace’s mysterious nature, but still believes he can kill her as he would a predictable animal. This quote is supported by his frequent killing of animals and taxidermy, but little does he know that he is the prey to Grace’s predator. In hindsight, their encounters with a murderous raccoon and mountain lion were preceded by Grace’s arrival at the ranch.

“[She] caught me completely by surprise. Grace charged at me, hitting me in the stomach like a lineman on the football field. I gasped, falling backward. This wasn’t the first time she took my breath away. When I first laid eyes on her, I knew she’d be a fighter. My back cracked against the wooden porch step. I winced and rolled to the side. While I collected myself, she was already running back into the house. Had she ever seen a horror movie? You never run back inside.”

Despite being caught off guard by Grace, Calvin acts confident and playful as he searches for her in the house. It is only when her drugged coffee takes effect that he realizes she has been toying with him from the start. This twist echoes his comment about the predictable behavior of animals (Important Quote #22), as Grace successfully predicted his arrogance.

“Everything had gone according to plan—mostly. This wasn’t my first rodeo. This was what I needed to do. It kept my life in balance. It kept me in equilibrium. Have you ever had an itch in the middle of your back, just out of reach? I have, and I’ve learned how to scratch it. […]

Some people kill because they enjoy it. And I know that’s frustrating to hear. There is no why. There’s no rhyme or reason. I just enjoy it. Call it a hobby if you will. You like to read. I like to watch the life drain from a person.”

Having shed her identity as Grace, Avery arrives home in Chicago, reflects on her successful retreat, and casually acknowledges herself as a serial killer: From her childhood, she was simply different and learned to scratch her “itch” through murder. In describing her annual retreats as a “hobby,” she breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the reader: “You like to read.” This moment adds another element of horror to the mystery-thriller, as Avery’s equation of herself to the reader implies her “itch” could manifest in anyone.