In Home Before Dark, the Holt family briefly lived in the house where an unspeakable crime once occurred. Right off the bat, this novel reminded me of a reimagining of The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson. Is the place really haunted by evil forces, as her father claimed? Or are there more earthbound-and dangerous-secrets hidden within its walls? In the latest thriller from New York Times bestseller Riley Sager, a woman returns to the house made famous by her father’s bestselling horror memoir. As Maggie experiences strange occurrences straight out of her father’s book, she starts to believe that what he wrote was more fact than fiction. Even more unnerving is Baneberry Hall itself-a place filled with relics from another era that hint at a history of dark deeds. And locals aren’t thrilled that their small town has been made infamous thanks to Maggie’s father.

People from the past, chronicled in House of Horrors, lurk in the shadows. When Maggie inherits Baneberry Hall after her father’s death, she returns to renovate the place to prepare it for sale. But she also doesn’t believe a word of it. Today, Maggie is a restorer of old homes and too young to remember any of the events mentioned in her father’s book. His tale of ghostly happenings and encounters with malevolent spirits became a worldwide phenomenon, rivaling The Amityville Horror in popularity-and skepticism. They spent three weeks there before fleeing in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a nonfiction book called House of Horrors. Twenty-five years ago, she and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods.

Home before dark novel reviews