Home Before Dark by Riley Sager – a Review

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Description:
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:

Home Before Dark by Riley Sager is another standalone psychological thriller that I have become accustomed to from this author.  I am amazed how Sager continues to write intense exciting edge of your seat stories that have us holding our breaths from start to finish. 

Home Before Dark switches between two POV’s; one set in the present and the other set 25 years ago.  We meet our heroine, Maggie Holt, who inherits a Victorian estate in Vermont from her father, who recently deceased.  Maggie has spent most of her life knowing about this scary mansion, as 25 years ago her parents bought the rundown Baneberry Hall; and after staying only 20 days, they run out of the house to never come back.  Her father wrote a bestselling book (House of Horrors) about their horrifying experience with spirits/ghosts, and Maggie has hated this book, believing it all to be a lie.  She remembers nothing about the place, especially since she was only 5 years old at the time, and neither of her parents would ever talk about it.

Despite her mother trying to convince Maggie (she is an interior designer) to not go there, just sell it, she decides to go and renovate the estate, and then sell it.  Maggie will begin to hear strange noises in the night, and we learn more about those who lived in the house and the so-called spirits from her POV.  I liked seeing Maggie’s POV, but it was her father’s (Ewan) POV that was scary, crazy and horrifying, as we saw through his eyes what was happening.  In Ewan’s POV, most of it is from his book, which details the horror, ghosts, etc; which eventually drove them out of the house.

In the present time, Maggie begins to see shadows and noises, which she tries to shake off as her imagination.  Having hated the book as a lie, she begins to worry that maybe she is wrong, especially after talking to those who were still alive and were part of the mansion.  There are so many twists and surprises that we see in Maggie’s present time that slowly changes the game, and it is here where during the last 1/3 of the book it becomes a wild, exciting, riveting race to the climax.  I was on the edge of my seat, as one surprise after another kept me unable to put the book down; a couple of times I needed to step away, as I felt parts being downright creepy.

What follows is an intense, exciting, creepy, edge of your seat gothic horror thriller that a had so many surprising twists, keeping us engrossed to the very end.  Riley Sager once again gives us another fantastic story that was so very well written.  I do not want to give any spoilers, as you really need to read Home Before Dark from start to finish.  If you enjoy thrillers, suspense, and mystery, look no further than reading anything by Riley Sager.

Reviewed by Barb

Copy provided by Publisher