You Shouldn't Have Come Here

Like many “locked room” mysteries, You Shouldn’t Have Come Here establishes a cast of potential suspects, even though there is no clear crime at stake until Calvin attacks Grace in Chapter 48. Jeneva Rose maintains an ominous tone by describing characters’ conflicts and relationships. Beyond her two first-person narrators, Rose introduces other Wyoming residents over the course of the novel. Charlotte, who is desperately in love with Calvin, shows a willingness to do or say whatever she must to drive Grace out of Wyoming. Charlotte’s ex-husband Wyatt, a deputy and lifelong friend of Calvin and Joe, picks fights with both brothers when he finds out they had flings with Charlotte. Joe, who spent six months in prison for Calvin’s murder of former girlfriend Lisa, resents his older brother for being favored by their deceased parents. As if in retaliation, a drunken Joe conceals but later reveals their parents’ murder-suicide. Betty, Calvin’s overprotective surrogate mother, secretly stops taking medication and Albert, an Airbnb guest, is later revealed to be Calvin and Joe’s uncle. Albert confesses to having secrets or “demons” (208), one of them possibly being complicity in Calvin’s murders.

The characters with the deadliest secrets, however, are the two first-person narrators—whose personable voices conceal their true selves. Grace—whose real name is Avery—is a seasoned killer who describes her annual murders as freeing. Every year, she chooses an ideal target in a random place and isolates them as her chosen pseudonym. As “Grace,” Avery eliminates physical and digital evidence of her presence in Dubois, Wyoming, before returning to her loving family in Chicago. While Calvin’s secrets come to light over the course of the novel, Betty and Joe hint at having always known his true self; however, like Albert’s “demons,” Betty is inhibited by lack of medication and Joe by alcohol consumption, which makes their complicity ambiguous. Betty admonishes Calvin and Grace for their spontaneous romance, warning the latter to leave the ranch; this is perhaps to protect both parties. Joe tries to burn down Calvin’s house to “save” Grace from Calvin, without realizing she is a serial killer in her own right. It is later revealed that Calvin was responsible for his girlfriend Lisa’s death and continues to kill women who stay at his ranch. Before killing him, Grace learns he locked a former guest named Briana in a shed at the ranch. When she investigates his closet, she sees the mounted heads of three women, recognizing their names from his guestbook; there are also two spaces reserved for Briana and herself. Overall, there are no happy endings for the novel’s secret-keepers apart from Avery, who returns home as if nothing happened. The one thing that sets her apart from the other characters is that she never shares her secrets with anyone but the reader. Thus, Rose implies secrets can be one’s undoing, unless they are taken to the grave.