YMMV / I Live in Your Basement

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: I Live In Your Basement is a big lipped alligator book, but a couple of particularly odd scenes stand out:
  • Near the beginning of the book, Marco gets hit in the head with a baseball bat by mistake and has to stay home until he recovers. At one point after he goes back to school, the teacher mentions they are learning about how healthcare works and asks if Marco can tell about his stay at the hospital. Marco inexplicably has no memory of being in the hospital, and doesn't even realize he doesn't remember until the teacher mentions this. This whole thing is never explained or brought up again.
  • Much later, after Marco has seen Keith a few times and had other bizarre things happen, his mom takes him to the doctor. After he tells the doctor everything that happened, the doctor says he wants to take out Marco's brain and look at it under a microscope. Even more bizarrely, Marco's mom doesn't see anything odd or scary about this. None of this is ever explained (unless it's meant to be a Stealth Pun about how Marco's brain is so small you'd need a microscope to see it), and it's never brought up again. And it turns out to be irrelevant, as the first half of the book is All Just a Dream that ends before the brain-removal takes place.
• Bizarro Episode: Even as strange as some of the books got, I Live in Your Basement stands out in particular for the sheer breadth of its shockingness.
• Squick: The cover image for the book might be hard to look at depending on how strong your stomach is. For those who are really curious, look at it here.
• Tear Jerker: In a way, the reveal at the end that Keith is in a similar situation to Marco. Keith clearly wants to live a normal life with human kids, but his nightmare indicates he's terrified that Marco will hate and fear him as his mother implies. When the real Marco appears at the very end, all Keith does is beg the boy to go back to sleep, likely aware they can never be friends.
  • The paperweight dream. With the ending and its subtext in mind, it transparently represents Keith's fear that attempting to approach Marco will result in Marco murdering Keith.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: While I Live In Your Basement is a well-remembered Cult Classic, the main character, Marco, never really gets to have his whole character explored more in the story. The twist at the end of the novel where Keith is revealed to be dreaming he is Marco certainly doesn't help.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: I Live In Your Basement is considered one of the more unique novels of the series due to its complex execution of psychological fear. This is one of the main reasons why even some of the fans of the novel consider the twist at the end the weakest part of the story and wanted the story to focus more on Marco and how he would escape his psychological fear alive, which would've been a great opportunity to show some interesting Character Development on his part as well.