Horror Book Review: Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

 

This week’s Horror Book Pick is HOME BEFORE DARK by Riley Sager. The book was published in September 2020 and still holds a place in the bestsellers list for Ghost Mysteries and Paranormal Suspense. 

The book has received rave reviews for its pacing, constant twists, and genuine scare scenes. 

While this is what usually attracts horror fans to books, some were disappointed by the twists coming up after each page. Many were also confused by the jumping timelines. 

Book Review of HOME BEFORE DARK 

Usually my book reviews are quick and based of on the samples. However, after reading a couple of pages, I knew that I just had to read the entire book. 

After a long time, I finally found a book that I found not only absorbing but genuinely scary. 

The book grabs you from the very beginning as we get to read a book within a book. It’s Ewan Holt’s story that is based on a true story. The book is titled House of Horrors and in the opening, it is his daughter Maggie who delivers a chilling dialogue, asking her father to check for ghosts. 

Her father indulges his five-year-old’s curiosity and fears. He checks all around the room for the ghosts. His daughter has named one of them Mister Shadow. 

We then meet Maggie in the present. Her father, Ewan, has passed away and while she has always lived in the shadows of the bestseller book based on her life at the Baneberry Hall and why the family fled on July 15th in the dead of night. 

Maggie is shocked to learn that his father had never sold Baneberry Hall even though the family hasn’t lived there in years. She is even more taken aback to find that she has inherited it. 

Maggie meets with her mother Jess who has remarried after the divorce. She is ready to take the house off her hands but Maggie still drives all the way to the house to face her past. 

She finds it in desperate need of repair and enlists the help of neighbor and handyman, Dane. 

As days pass, Maggie realizes some of the events in the book she thought were fiction may be coming true. She decided to delve deeper into the mystery and try to remember why she and her family fled Baneberry Hall on July 15th. 

The premise is interesting and in true haunted house fashion, we find that the mansion has a past. 

The house was built in 1875 by William Garson who was the richest man in town. He had a daughter named Indigo Garson who purportedly died under mysterious circumstances when she was sixteen years old. 

There are several haunting incidents such as the record player playing The Sound Of Music’s popular song Sixteen going on Seventeen. 

Or the chandelier lighting up on its own. And the unmistakable thud at 4:54 a.m. every day. 

There are snakes, mysteries unfolding at every corner and some genuinely creepy moments until the climax when everything is eventually revealed. 

Yes, there is a twist. But it comes after a series of twists. 

The story flows well and its thrilling aspects will make you turn the pages. I certainly could not put it down. 

However, the climax was too rushed, and the characters kept coming and going away in mere moments. 

The timelines are handled well but it is the endings of both the story in the story, as well as the main story, that was a bit of a let down mainly because it was overly dramatic, something that you would see in a movie or a TV show. The reveal, and the character behind it all, is also a bit obvious.

Turns out there are no actual hauntings at the mansion but we are shown a moment where the protagonist believes she did see a ghost help her. Or was it just her imagination?

Home Before Dark is a captivating horror story that delivers surprises in such a terrifying manner that you will find yourself startled but still not able to keep the book down. 

Yes, it will remind you of a horror movie with all the dramatizations but maybe it isn’t all that bad. 

I would definitely recommend reading HOME BEFORE DARK if you are searching for an effective haunted house book. 

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