Audrie Bretl Martin
Maggie Holt is all grown up. She is now a successful businesswoman who buys and flips houses and she’s good at what she does. But her father has just died, and she found out she inherited her childhood home—a home neither she nor her mother had any idea her father still owned. Great news for a house flipper, right? Maybe not so much due to the ghosts and other strange happenings.
Maggie doesn’t believe in ghosts, even though she lived in the haunted house when she was a child and was a witness to bells that rang by themselves, a girl that kept appearing to her and then disappearing into an old wardrobe, and record players that played all by themselves to empty rooms—think Amityville Horror without all the family murder but with the malevolent spirits. In fact, Amityville Horror is even mentioned in this novel.
But that was 25 years ago and she doesn’t remember most of her childhood except for what her father wrote in his book, House of Horrors, which made Maggie and her family famous in the context of the world but infamous in the small Vermont town in which Baneberry Hall (as the family home was named) loomed large.
When Maggie returns to Baneberry, she is immediately greeted by locals who don’t want her around and still carry a grudge against her family because of her father’s book and the wrongs that they perceive he did to the town by publishing it. Strange things begin happening and she immediately thinks that it is the locals playing tricks on her and trying to force her to leave but is it?
She stands resolute that she is going to fix up Baneberry with the help of her flipping partner, sell it, and have it out of her life forever. But the fact that her father kept this house and continued to pay the staff to work there sticks in the back of her mind. Add to that, even her mother didn’t know that her father kept the home…they were now divorced but were still married when the family initially fled the house in the middle of the night, leaving all their worldly possessions behind. The weirdness stacks up.
So, Maggie goes about interviewing people in the town, including the chief of police and the staff of the house, to try to get to the bottom of what her father was hiding and if it was the house that was haunted or her family’s relationship. She knows the house has secrets, a dark past that her family took ownership of when they moved in, but perhaps her father did too. What was he hiding, and why would he continue to keep something in the family which had been so detrimental to their longevity? And why had he never mentioned that he still owned the house and would leave it to her when he passed?
I don’t want to go into too many specifics as I don’t want to ruin it for you, but this novel has it all—it’s creepy, gives jump scares as every good horror novel should, and divulges family secrets that may be even darker than the spirits wandering Baneberry Hall itself. In other words, if you’re a fan of horror novels and thrillers, you should definitely make time to read it.
I love Riley Sager, and my reaction to his fifth thriller, Home Before Dark, which was published last summer in June 2020, is no different than all the others: I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it, and I was not disappointed. Most of Sager’s lead characters are women, and he has an uncanny ability to capture the female spirit. In fact, there isn’t a lot known about Sager except that it is a pseudonym used by thriller novelist, Todd Ritter. Ritter had written novels before under his own name but found that they didn’t sell well. Readers didn’t often believe the authenticity of a female-driven novel written by a male. So, he began using the name Riley, which was just androgynous enough to catapult his work onto the bestseller list and allowed him to captivate a broader audience.
He also has a wonderful ability to give a nod to more some of the classic horror novels and movies that came before without ripping them off. In his last book, Lock Every Door, he calls to mind Rosemary’s Baby in a unique and captivating way. His first novel, Final Girls, surrounds a group of twenty-something women who fall prey to a murderer in a classic slasher-type setting. I think that’s part of what I love most about his writing—he pays homage because he seems to be a real fan.
Another interesting thing about this novel is that it is a book within a book, alternating between Maggie’s present-day story to chapters in her father’s book which walk the reader through the history of Baneberry Hall and the family’s experience with it. It’s a super interesting way to frame a novel and one that held my attention without confusing me as to which “book” I was reading. The layout of the novel is even creative, and the reader can immediately tell by sight without too much effort where the modern-day framing story ends and the fictional novel begins. This is done with a subtle font change as well as a few other design elements on the page. The header even changes when we’re reading Maggie’s father’s book.
Like all of Sager’s novels, this is a light, fun, fast-paced read that holds the reader’s attention from the very first page. The story unfolds effortlessly and gives the audience a real investment in the characters and their development. In fact, it was dubbed one of USA Today’s Best Books of 2020 and Rolling Stone called it “A cross between Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places and Ghost Hunter heir Alexandra Holzer’s autobiography…A haunted house story with a twist.”
Home Before Dark is published by Dutton and is available from all book retailers now.
Looking for more horror book reviews? We’ve got you:
“Whisper Down the Lane Is a Gripping Satanic Panic Thriller”
“The Lost Village: Blair Witch Meets Midsommar”
