Home Before Dark

Today’s post is on Home Before Dark by Riley Sager. It is 384 pages long and is published by Dutton. The cover is dark green with a chandelier under the title. The intended reader is someone who likes mystery horror stories. There is mild foul language, no sex, and mild violence in this novel. The story is told from first person close of Maggie and her father, Ewan. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket- 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.

Review- A gripping story of mystery and horror that had me turning pages as I tried to figure out the story. Sager has done a wonderful job with this story, the characters, and the setting. I only have one problem with the story and it’s at the end Maggie’s parents are stupid but other than that this was one tight story. With the story being told in two parts one from the book Maggie’s father wrote’ House of Horrors’ and then from Maggie’s perspective in the present day as she tries to understand her father and what really happened to them when they lived in the house. It is more than just a haunted house story but a complicated family narrative with a horrorish background. I highly recommend this novel. 

I give this novel a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this novel from my local library.