Twenty-five years ago, Maggie Holt and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. Three weeks later they fled in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a nonfiction book called House of Horrors. His horror memoir 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 is 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.
Book Review Blog: Home Before Dark Review
A family flees their home into the shroud of darkness, leaving their belongings to stay at a flimsy hotel in the middle of the night. There, they call the local sheriff and relay to her a tale of terror – their house is haunted. What follows is a book deal that makes their home, Banberry Hall, infamous with the events leading up to the Holt family’s urgent evacuation. One might be inclined to say that what I just described was the events that occurred at another infamous house – The Amityville Horror. While there are similarities, particularly the fact that they are both fictionalized accounts, Riley Sager’s Home Before Dark, in my opinion, stands alone on its own pedestal, far above that of Amityville.
Sager is self-aware in that he too references The Amityville Horror. Our main protagonist in Home Before Dark, Maggie Holt, compares herself to the Amityville kids as they too fleed the famed Long Island home in the 1970s in the middle of the night. As adults, they resent their fathers’ “sins,” namely, making claims that their house is purportedly haunted and suffering a lifetime of doubt and ridicule living under the shadow of the story. This is the plight of Maggie, having lived a life under the rule of what she deems a fictionalized account of what happened all those years ago when she was only five years old. Surely, Mister Shadow and Miss Pennyface were mere figments of her imagination that her dad embellished and exaggerated for the sake of amping up the scares in his fictionalized book, House of Horrors, and had no bearing in reality… right?
Home Before Dark presents two narratives from two different perspectives, one of House of Horrors by Ewan Holt, Maggie’s late father, and the other by Maggie herself in the present time. As luck would have it, Magie learns that she inherits Baneberry Hall. She is shocked and intrigued by this revelation. On his deathbed, Ewan Holt relays a cryptic message to Maggie, “It’s not safe there, not for you.” Now, armed with the opportunity to seek out the answers that seemed to have been erased from her memory, she embarks on a journey of self-discovery and truth. This message sets Maggie on a journey of discovery that proves to be both horrific and life-altering.
Home Before Dark is my first Sager novel, and it left one hell of an impact on me. It is a gripping subtle, yet compelling ghost story with an engaging and haunting backstory with questions abound that lingered over me until the stupendous climax. Because there are chapters of Holt’s famous novel, House of Horrors intertwined, we are treated with what feels like two books in one. House of Horrors gets into the nitty-gritty of the horror and the ghostly happenings. On the other end, in the present with Maggie, we are passengers on her quest to uncover the mystery of Baneberry Hall and the lapse in her memory. Home Before Dark is an excellent read for fans of the paranormal and murder mysteries. There are twists and turns around every corner, and nearly every chapter ends with a cliffhanger that enticed me to keep flipping the page and reading well into the night and past my bedtime. The only gripe I would have is that I wished there were more to read as Sager’s writing had me hook, line, and sinker. Big fan of this one!