Home Before Dark

Gripping, but with a couple flaws
I love a good haunted house story. And as a skeptic myself, albeit one with a love for supernatural fiction, I also love a story that’s about the search for truth behind apparently supernatural events. This book ticks all those boxes, so I dug into it with great eagerness. What I found was a book that kept me thoroughly entertained throughout–I read it in a single day, with only a couple short breaks–but nevertheless had a couple flaws.Let’s start with the good stuff. The writing is top quality, and the pacing is definitely on point. The characters are reasonably well-developed, and the dual (past and present) story lines manage to work surprisingly well (though the narrative voice is perhaps a bit too similar between the alternating sections). I particularly like the way the author manages to simultaneously build suspense and keep the reader flip-flopping regarding what actually happened, and the blend of supernatural and skeptical is both intriguing and narratively effective.However, I have two complaints. First, the story starts off feeling a bit too familiar. Family flees haunted house, writes a book, and their adult child returns decades later to find out what really happened. Following numerous real-world scandals involving families’ fraudulent claims of supernatural terrors in their homes, this plot has become well-trod. That doesn’t mean it can’t be effective, but it does mean that, while we might enjoy the same old tropes, if a book really wants to stand out, it needs to bring something new to the table. Early on, it doesn’t really look like this book will bring anything new to the table. The first half or so reads like a well told version of the story, but fundamentally the same old story none the less. However, fortunately, though I won’t spoil exactly what they are, there are some twists, beginning about halfway through the book, that call the familiar into question and leave the reader guessing and turning the pages right until the ending.The ending itself is a mixed bag, however. Again, I won’t spoil anything, but I find myself conflicted between acknowledging that the novel’s conclusion certainly does wrap everything up and feeling like some of the revelations, offered in fairly rapid succession in the book’s final chapters, while logically sound, still undercut some of the book’s tension. I’ve said many times (in reviews of other books and films, and in other places) that ending a horror novel is a tricky business, because it requires balancing the reader’s need for narrative closure against the simple fact that the unknown is scarier than the known. This novel definitely suffers from the same problem. It’s not that the ending is entirely unsatisfactory–it actually does a good job of concluding the story–but rather that once the reader has too much information, the story simply isn’t all that scary any more.All that having been said, despite my couple of complaints (which I guess can be viewed as one complaint resolving the other), I found this to be an excellent novel on the whole, and I’d recommend it for anyone looking for a good spooky tale.

I was dragging my feet to finish one of my most anticipated books of 2020…
** spoiler alert ** Riley Sager is an author that I will automatically buy. I remember reading Final Girls when it first came out and throwing it across the room when it got to the climax, not because I was frustrated, but because I was excited for the story that Sager was spinning. I am a devoted fan, and while I acknowledge that Sager’s writing leans toward reboots of horror tropes, I still seek out the thrill I get from reading his books. All this to say that I was incredibly surprised to find that I was dragging my feet to finish one of my most anticipated books of 2020 – Home Before Dark.In Home Before Dark, Sager plays to his strengths of reconfiguring one of our canon works in the horror genre, The Amityville Horror. This is familiar territory for Sager. Each of his previous books stands as a tribute to similar horror sub-genres or a specific work. Final Girls was a slasher throwback reminiscent of the movie Scream, The Last Time I Lied can be tied to Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp, and Lock Every Door was a clear love letter to Ira Levin and Rosemary’s Baby – in a fitting tribute, the book is even dedicated to him.I’ve seen other reviews compare this book to The Haunting of Hill House, and I think that is an apt comparison. It is worth noting though that, if we are using the show as our example, the first episode lays out exactly what the older brother experienced and then wrote about that made the estate – and his family – famous. As the show reveals through all the following episodes is what the rest of the family experienced that was left out of his book. In Home Before Dark, we do see a similar play between constructed truth, the faultiness of memory, and the apparently supernatural.Maggie Holt is the daughter of Ewan Holt who wrote ‘House of Horrors’, the book that has plagued her life since she was a child. In ‘House of Horrors’, Holt explains why his family fled in the middle of the night from their recently purchased home in rural Vermont – Baneberry Hall. Holt weaves a story of a haunted house that is doomed to repeat its tragic past with each family that occupies its walls. The problem is, while Maggie is a starring character in her father’s book, she remembers next to nothing about when her family lived at Baneberry Hall. Convinced her parents lied about the contents of the book, she has grown-up frustrated and hurt by their chicanery.The book opens when we learn that Maggie’s father has recently died and she discovers that Baneberry Hall now belongs to her. Determined to uncover any repressed memories she has of her time at the house, Maggie decides to return to Baneberry Hall to not only flip the house for resale, but to do some much needed soul-searching. Once back at Baneberry Hall, Maggie connects with the locals who remember when the Holts lived there and help Maggie put some of the pieces of her memories back into place. Consequently, Maggie learns what parts of ‘House of Horrors’ were fictions and which hold up as truth.Following the pattern of Sager’s previous works, Home Before Dark jumps between the present day and flashback scenes. However, unlike the previous novels, Home Before Dark exercises this plot device to excess. The structure of the book is arranged so that nearly every other chapter is from Maggie’s present day perspective punctuated by Holt’s original text – ‘House of Horrors’. While this effectively syncs up the events and peculiar happenings we experience with Maggie, with her foreknowledge of her father’s book, it ultimately leaves readers deflated and following irrelevant and unnecessary red herrings. In fact, it isn’t until the last 20 pages of the book that “all becomes clear” in an almost too tidy fashion that left me incredibly unsatisfied while Maggie is finally at peace with her past.An added frustration I noticed with this plot structure was that, if the fonts had not changed to indicate to me whose story I was readying – Maggie’s or Ewan’s – their ‘writing’ voices were exactly the same. It’s not clear if this was intentional because Maggie had internalized her father’s book, or just a bad choice on Sager’s part. Either way, I would have liked to see more distinct characters emerge from these pages.Near the end of the book, when Maggie does finally learn the full truth of her past, what does she decide to do with that knowledge and her newfound sense of agency? She writes a sequel to ‘House of Horrors’, and in a bait and switch ending, we realize that we’ve been reading Maggie’s book ‘ House of Secrets’ alongside the text of ‘House of Horrors’. I cannot decide if this was a brilliant literary move on Sager’s part…or manipulative. Yet again reinforcing that information has been withheld from the reader all along. Regardless, there might have been a more engaging ways to have set up this frame narrative more along the lines of The Golden Notebook or even an interactive approach like in S..Lost somewhere between uninspiring character development, withheld information, the split timelines, whiplash frame stories, and the grand reveal, Sager didn’t leave much for readers to hold onto. However, Home Before Dark is still an enjoyable read for what it is. It still has many of the typical Sager marks of excellence, but I nearly DNF’d this book and only my loyalty to the author kept me going.

awesome
I was unable to put this book down! The ending is shocking! Read it now! Riley Sager is an amazing writer!!!!

I really love haunted house stories and loved this so much that I’m buying more books by this auther

Entertaining! My favorite from this author to this moment. Fast paced, a lot of plot twist, thrilling and aLittle spooky

Too good