What if your father wrote a best-selling memoir about your family’s time in a haunted malevolent house, but you couldn’t remember any of those experiences? Is your father a liar? Or have you blocked out the past because it’s too terrifying?
Maggie Holt has always thought her father’s non-fiction book, House of Horrors, was full of lies. She has spent her life being treated like a freak and dodging questions about what really happened at Baneberry Hall when she was five. She resents her father writing the book, although its huge success provided her family with financial stability. Now her father is dead, and Maggie learns she has inherited the house in Vermont that her father never sold. Before his death, Maggie’s father warned her never to return, but as a home renovator, Maggie is drawn to the house’s history and the secrets within its walls. Upon her arrival, she soon learns that not everyone or everything is happy with her return. As Maggie starts to remember more about her terrifying time at the house, she traverses a slim line between fact and fiction. Was her father who she thought he was? Will the truth set her free or destroy her?
Riley Sager’s ability to use horror genre tropes and give them a new twist makes him a shining star in the genre. HOME BEFORE DARK is no exception, using the haunted house trope to provide a scary, terrifying account of one family’s supposed experiences. Told in dual narratives, we see two separate timelines unfolding. One is Maggie’s father’s recollections told through the pages of his book. The other is Maggie’s return to the house and her struggles to clarify what really happened. This constant balance between what was real and what was fiction keeps readers on their toes. As the revelations keep coming, the story takes on a whole new direction and Maggie must face some hard truths about what really happened the night her family fled the house in Vermont.
The writing is clear and concise and the pacing provides a nice buildup to the big reveal at the end. Part horror story and part mystery, HOME BEFORE DARK pulls you in and takes you along for a terrifying and scary ride. When you think you know the truth, it throws yet another twist at you. Reminiscent of THE AMITYVILLE HORROR or THE SHINING, Sager’s latest gives us some serious scares and memorable scenes. You may even check your coffee twice after reading this novel.
In the latest thriller from New York Times bestseller Riley Sager, a woman returns to the house made famous by her father’s bestselling horror memoir. Is the place really haunted by evil forces, as her father claimed? Or are there more earthbound—and dangerous—secrets hidden within its walls?
What was it like? Living in that house.
Maggie Holt is used to such questions. Twenty-five years ago, she and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. They spent three weeks there before fleeing in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a nonfiction book called House of Horrors. His tale of ghostly happenings and encounters with malevolent spirits became a worldwide phenomenon, rivaling The Amityville Horror in popularity—and skepticism.
Today, Maggie is a restorer of old homes and too young to remember any of the events mentioned in her father’s book. But she also doesn’t believe a word of it. Ghosts, after all, don’t exist. When Maggie inherits Baneberry Hall after her father’s death, she returns to renovate the place to prepare it for sale. But her homecoming is anything but warm. People from the past, chronicled in House of Horrors, lurk in the shadows. And locals aren’t thrilled that their small town has been made infamous thanks to Maggie’s father. Even more unnerving is Baneberry Hall itself—a place filled with relics from another era that hint at a history of dark deeds. As Maggie experiences strange occurrences straight out of her father’s book, she starts to believe that what he wrote was more fact than fiction.
Alternating between Maggie’s uneasy homecoming and chapters from her father’s book, Home Before Dark is the story of a house with long-buried secrets and a woman’s quest to uncover them—even if the truth is far more terrifying than any haunting.
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