Title: Home Before Dark

Author: Riley Sager

Series: none

Publisher: Dutton Books

Publication Date: June 30th, 2020

Genres: Thriller, Adult

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.

The haunted house trope is one of my favorites within the thriller genre, but it’s one that seems difficult to execute well. A haunted house premise always piques my interest, but I often walk away from those reads highly disappointed and wanting more. Therefore, I picked up an ARC of Home Before Dark with excitement, but also a healthy dose of skepticism. I was pleasantly surprised, to say the least, and this book encompassed many of the tropes and themes that I enjoy when it comes to haunted house tales. Add in some paranormal elements, and this book was a chilling success!

This book is disorienting in all of the right ways. The setting is dark, atmospheric, and moody, and a creepy old house adds to the eery tone. The narration jumps back and forth between multiple timelines, building suspense in one timeframe before quickly switching to another timeframe before the big reveal. Add in some questionable and potentially unreliable characters, and you have no idea who you can trust or what everyone’s motivations are. With a possible undertone of paranormal elements at play, readers are left questioning everything and looking around every corner trying to predict the next twist or turn. The thrilling elements were perfect in the one – the tone oscillated between creepy and slightly off-putting, to downright terrifying and panic-inducing. The horror relies on many of the common childhood fears, and the vivid descriptions truly transported you back to that sort of mindset as the terrifying scenes unfold.

The pacing was relatively fast, with a few slower moments that allowed readers to catch their breath and soak in the creepy atmosphere. This rendered it a quick read that was easy to follow, and I flew through reading this one! One of the characters wrote a book about the haunted house in question, and I found the inclusion of excerpts from this book within the narrative to be a unique and interesting change of pace. Recently, I’ve been loving books that include mixed media or a book-within-a-book, and Riley Sager successfully pulled off this setup!

The one component of the book that lowered this from a 5-star rating was the final twist. The entire novel kept me guessing as to how it would conclude, but the ending seemed so far-fetched that there was no way I could have predicted it. The preceding portion of the book didn’t appear to lay the necessary foundation to foresee the conclusion, and this seemed like a cheap attempt at thwarting and subverting readers’ predictions. Consequently, I wasn’t shocked by this reveal, but instead angry and frustrated that there would have been no way for me to arrive at the twist or solution on my own. In hindsight, I wasn’t able to identify hints and clues throughout the narrative that would have pointed me toward the true conclusion, and this felt like a lazy and lackluster approach to keeping readers in the dark.

Overall, with the exception of the ending, this book was a wild success for me! It felt very reminiscent of a Stephen King novel, and I loved the small-town feel and creepy, atmospheric setting in a “haunted” house. I enjoyed the thrilling aspects of the book, which helped to keep me on my toes, and the rapidly moving plot was perfectly paced! Sager’s writing was compelling, easily digestible, and helped to set the underlying mood and tone throughout the narrative. Sager’s other works have been fairly hit or miss for me, and I’ve yet to have a 5-star read from him. However, I’m willing to give his future works a chance, and I’m still holding out for that 5-star read!