Home Before Dark - Riley Sager

 

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 a rambling Victorian estate called Baneberry Hall. They spent three weeks there before fleeing in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a memoir called House of Horrors. His tale of ghostly happenings and encounters with malevolent spirits became a worldwide phenomenon.

 

Now, Maggie has inherited Baneberry Hall after her father's death. She was too young to remember any of the events mentioned in her father's book. But she doesn't believe a word of it. Ghosts, after all, don't exist.

 

But when she returns to Baneberry Hall to prepare it for sale, her homecoming is anything but warm. People from the pages of her father's book lurk in the shadows, and locals aren't thrilled that their small town has been made infamous. Even more unnerving is Baneberry Hall itself - a place that hints of dark deeds and unexplained happenings. 

 

As the days pass, Maggie begins to believe that what her father wrote was more fact than fiction. That, either way, someone - or something - doesn't.

 

 

Home Before Dark, by Riley Sager, follows Maggie Holt as she returns to the childhood home that has haunted her her entire life. Maggie's memories of the house are less than pleasant, and returning to the infamous Baneberry Hall brings them all swiftly flooding to the surface. As she begins renovating it with the intention of selling it, she finds herself looking into her past, trying to sort through her cache of memories and decipher what was real, and what wasn't. The book switches between the point of view of Maggie, and of the book Maggie's father wrote. The book tells in great detail what happened during their time at Baneberry Hall, and is written to suggest these were all genuine events. Maggie's relationship with her mother and father was frayed due to the book, which lead to years of taunts from people insinuating that her father was even insane or a liar. Maggie herself wasn't sure she could disagree. Maggie herself is a bit of a skeptic, and to begin with, isn't deterred by the ghosts that allegedly haunt the house. She is hugely headstrong and is a very likeable character.

As she stayed at the Haunted Mansion, strange affairs occurred that led her to believe that her fathers version of events was maybe not as fictional as she initially thought they were. As secrets unfold, things start to make even less and less sense, until a confrontational conversation with her parents put's everything to rest. Almost. 

 

I am so genuinely excited to review this book. To say it was a thriller would be an understatement, this book was a whole movie. This book makes the room you're sitting in too quiet, the creaks and moans in your house suddenly too loud. It was perfectly haunting and superbly spooky. I wanted to hide from the book and dive right into it all at once. The POV changes were flawless executed, and I was utterly entranced until the very end. 

 

I don't enjoy sci-fi and I'm not a huge believer in ghosts, so what I especially liked about this book was how everything still remained realistic and physically possible, without diving too far into the ghost/fantasy realm. I love the challenge of guessing the plot twist in a book, but what I love even more is when it's so unexpected that I am completely unable to even attempt to anticipate the outcome, and that's exactly what happened here. The ending was satisfying and left me nodding in appreciation as I closed the book. Riley Sager hasn't disappointed me yet, but this is by far my favourite of his novels and I can give it a safe 9/10.