Title: Home Before Dark

Author: Riley Sager

Publisher: Dutton 2020

Genre: Horror

Pages: 400

Rating: 5/5 stars

Reading Challenges: UnRead Shelf Project

What was it like? Living in that house.
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.

I’m always here for a spooky house story and this one delivered! We get the perfect setting in Baneberry Hall, a mysterious past, and some truly creepy characters. Right away the spooky atmosphere pervades every page. We are thrown into the mystery of what happened 25 years ago (and even further back) at Baneberry Hall. We’re left with Maggie to try to understand what is real, lies, and potential supernatural. I found myself not wanting to read this at night in the dark. Sager perfectly creates a sense of unease that bleeds through the pages into real life. I rushed through the last 30 pages desperately needing to know what happened to Maggie. Such a great spooky book!

Next up on the TBR pile: