“My name is Maggie Holt. I’m a designer and, in many ways, a historian. I look for each house’s story and attempt to coax it out. I’m proud of the work I do. I’m good at it. I listen. I learn. I use that knowledge to design an interior that, while fully modern, always speaks to the home’s past. Every house has a story. Ours is a ghost story. It’s also a lie. And now that yet another person has died within these walls, it’s finally time to tell the truth.” – Riley Sager, Home Before Dark

I knew I wanted to read something by Riley Sager, so a few weeks back I put in my request via Libby for Home Before Dark (2020). The book was worth the wait. Sager is a popular psychological thriller novelist for a reason. Home Before Dark is written in the form of a novel within a novel (a style of writing I like), and the story is based loosely on the Long Island Amityville Horror craze from the 1970s.

​Home Before Dark is set in present-day Bartelby, VT, and when the book begins we are introduced to Maggie Holt, who is returning to Baneberry Hall. It’s a place she and her parents fled twenty-five years ago when Maggie was six. She has no memories of her time there. All she has is the bestselling memoir House of Horrors her father, Ewan Holt, published a year after they fled Baneberry in terror.

​House of Horrors became a national bestseller and also the source of Maggie’s childhood unhappiness. Reporters wanting to interview the family and kids at school bullying Maggie about how the book was made up. And even now as an adult, strangers want to know what really happened at Baneberry Hall. Was the story real?

​Maggie feels she knows the answer. Her father’s House of Horrors was made up. She doesn’t believe in ghosts or haunted houses. And though Maggie loves her parents, Ewan and Jess, she is angry that her family chose to publish a fictional story as true.

​And then Maggie’s father dies and leaves Baneberry Hall to her in his will. Maggie, who restores old homes, will fix it up and sell Baneberry to an interested buyer. But she also wants answers. Her parents would never talk to her about what really happened. And even more puzzling, Maggie was six when she left Baneberry Hall and yet she does not have a single memory of ever living there.

​​Throughout the book the chapters alternate between Maggie’s present day life and the actual book House of Horrors written by Ewan Holt. Maggie has read House of Horrors before, but when she comes back to Baneberry Hall and strange occurrences start happening she picks House of Horrors up again and notices the eerie similarities between what she is experiencing and what her father wrote about.

​And the chapters from House of Horrors are well done. I definitely felt Stephen King vibes from Ewan in which a good husband and father is trying to keep his family safe. Home Before Dark is a superior Haunted House mystery/thriller. 4 stars