Hello! I’m baaaack. I know, I know, it’s been too long. I’m apparently not very good at this whole blogging thing, but in my defense, I started a new job and a global pandemic brought everything to a standstill immediately after deciding to launch this new endeavor and we’re in the middle of a civil rights movement, so, you know, I’ve been thinking about other things.
However, I am really trying to make this review thing a regular occurrence. So, next up: Riley Sager’s latest, Home Before Dark, a creepy, twisted thriller that Sager’s fans will love.
The story focuses on Maggie Holt, an interior designer who briefly lived in the (fictional) notorious Baneberry Hall as a child – at least until she and her parents fled in the dark one night, never to return. Her dad then wrote a tell-all about their experience, saying that the reason they left was that Baneberry Hall was haunted.
Maggie doesn’t believe her father’s tales, but she’s lived in their shadow her entire life and watched them ruin her parents’ marriage and destroy her own relationship with her father. In spite of the effect they’ve had on her life, or maybe because of it, she becomes an interior designer, making a career out of helping people turn their houses into homes.
After her father dies, Maggie learns her father never sold Baneberry Hall – and it’s now hers. So, for the first time in 25 years she returns, with the intent of gutting the place, selling it, and never looking back. But from the day she arrived, nothing goes as planned. First, old strangers come out of the woodwork – mostly to express their displeasure with her father’s book and the lingering toll it’s left on their Vermont town.
Soon after, things start getting weird – like, really weird, like things-go-bump-in-the-night weird. Things start going missing. Then Maggie starts hearing music playing randomly (always the same song). Quickly, Maggie begins to consider that maybe her father was right – maybe Baneberry Hall really is haunted. And if it is, does that mean everything Maggie’s ever believed is a lie?
I tend to love Sager’s books for three reasons: One, he’s just a great writer – he always includes at least one or two twists that fit together perfectly at the end but are masterfully clever and half of the fun of reading his books is trying to puzzle out where you think the twists will pop up and what they’ll mean, how they’ll impact the plot, and where the characters will ultimately end up. Two, whatever the twist, his books are sufficiently creepy satisfy your horror story-itch. Home Before Dark is definitely geared toward all the Haunting of Hill House fans out there (though it’s much more similar to the recent Netflix adaptation than the original Shirley Jackson story, so if you were disappointed by the Netflix show, you may not love the book). Lastly, there’s always more there there: Home Before Dark isn’t just a good book to dive into when you’re in the mood to scare yourself, it’s also a story about family (and what you owe each other), what makes a house a home, and whether the places you grow up every really leave you. (Thomas Wolfe might have believed you can’t go home again, but he probably never had to grapple with living in a notorious haunted house.) And if they don’t, if you swing open the door to confront all your long-ago ghosts (real or imagined), if it’s like looking in a mirror, do you like what you see?