📖 BOOK REVIEW⠀📚
BOOK: Home Before Dark
AUTHOR: Riley Sager
@riley.sager
Publisher: Dutton @duttonbooks
Stars: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Published: June 30, 2020
Since I started reading Riley Sager earlier this year, this was probably my most anticipated book for 2020. And honestly, it did not disappoint. It is now my favorite Riley Sager book to date. Riley has a way of connecting plot lines, dropping little clue, and wrapping things up in a way you don’t expect. It’s a fresh look on old tropes.
This book, being about a haunted house, is one we are familiar with. And yet I can’t explain to you how it’s completely different. The stories are told between the book written by Maggie’s father about the 15 days their family lived in the house and Maggie’s own experience in the present. The stories parallel in satisfying ways to explain what truly happened to drive them out of this place.
You can see my video review here:
Small Summary:
Maggie Holt is used to such questions. Twenty-five years ago, she and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. 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. His tale of ghostly happenings and encounters with malevolent spirits became a worldwide phenomenon, rivaling The Amityville Horror in popularity—and skepticism.
Today, Maggie is a restorer of old homes and too young to remember any of the events mentioned in her father’s book. But she also doesn’t believe a word of it. Ghosts, after all, don’t exist. When Maggie inherits Baneberry Hall after her father’s death, she returns to renovate the place to prepare it for sale. But her homecoming is anything but warm. People from the past, chronicled in House of Horrors, lurk in the shadows. And locals aren’t thrilled that their small town has been made infamous thanks to Maggie’s father. Even more unnerving is Baneberry Hall itself—a place filled with relics from another era that hint at a history of dark deeds. 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.
*****
All thoughts and opinions are my own.