Do you want to uncover the dark history of Baneberry Hall? In HOME BEFORE DARK Maggie Holt returns to Baneberry Hall to restore and sell the Victorian estate that she and her family fled 25 years before. Maggie does not have memories of the time she spent in the house, especially the happenings that her late father detailed in his nonfiction story based on their stay in what he called the House of Horrors.
Once Maggie returns to the estate that she inherits after her father dies, Maggie meets people from the past apart from experiencing strange occurrences. Initially, she does not believe that ghosts are real but the strange happenings are just too real to be ignored. Could what her father wrote actually be true? Maggie decides that she wants to uncover the secrets that have seeped into Baneberry Hall throughout the many years of its existence.
I enjoyed HOME BEFORE DARK tremendously. The unsettling atmosphere was felt from the very beginning, which drew me into the story. There are alternating chapters where you follow Maggie and also get to read the book her father wrote about their stay—so it feels you are reading two books in one. Although there are two stories, the readability was fantastic because of how the two stories connect. There is also a huge creep factor, and I loved it! At times, the creepy moments were unexpected, which caught me off guard a number of times. There are many twists and turns within the story, as well as things that I did not see coming. All in all, it was a wonderful reading experience.
HOME BEFORE DARK had me on the edge of my seat. I am so happy that I was able to read this story where the secrets of Baneberry Hall were not only for Maggie to discover, they were also for me to discover as well. This story is one that will stay with me for a very long time!
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.