Book Review - Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

Title: Home Before Dark
Series: -
Author: Riley Sager
 
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 spend 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.
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. Ghost, 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 war, .
 
Review: In “Home Before Dark”, we follow Maggie. She lives alone and renovates houses with a friend. Twenty-five years ago, Maggie live in Baneberry Hall with her parents, Ewan and Jess. A house which is no know as a haunted house. At the time, Maggie was a little girl and she doesn’t remember anything from living there. Maggie has lots of fantasy as a child, where she claimed to see people in the house, that here parents didn’t. The family lived in Baneberry Hall for 20 days and left the house, to never return. Ewan wrote a book about it, claiming that it had ghosts in it.
 
He describes the strange evens that accumulated during their stay at baneberry Hall. Sounds they couldn’t explain, items inexplicably in other places, and of course the strange images Maggie seemed to see.
 
Now, twenty-five years later, Maggie decides to return to Baneberry Hall, after her dad’s passing and inheriting the house. She didn’t even know that he still owned it. This gives Maggie the chance to fix it up and sell the house. But also to see if the house is indeed haunted. After all, she can’t remember anything about the evens and firmly believes that the events in the book were made up by her father.
 
“Home Before Dark” is very well written for several reasons. First of all, we actually follow two stories in the book. We follow adult Maggie, in the present, who returns to Baneberry Hall. And twenty-five years in the past, when Maggie was young and living in Baneberry Hall with her parents. Telling the story of what Ewan wrote about in his best-selling novel. This makes the story exciting and frightening at times. It had some real scary moments and I was really hooked to the story.  
 
I thought it was a thriller when I picked it up, but when I got into it, it felt more like a horror story. In the end, it still is a thriller, more than a horror, but I loved the horror elements Sager incorporated in his book.
 
This is the second novel by Riley Sager that I have read, the other one being “Lock Every Door”. I loved that book. I do prefer that one over “Home Before Dark”, but I’m very curious about more of his work. I’m really liking his books so far and I will definitely be reading more of his work.
 
Rating: 4 / 5