So good I want my own copy. Definitely keeps you guessing. A thrilling ride.
This is a story of a house with long-buried secrets and Maggie Holt's quest to uncover them. 25 years ago she and her parents lived in Baneberry Hall but only stayed for 20 days. She soon finds out that the truth is more terrifying than any haunted house. This is a creepy Amityville Horror spine-chilling tale that switches from past and present. It is my first Riley Sager book but won't be my last.
I'm not typically drawn to ghost stories or stories about the supernatural; if there's a mystery supposedly caused by some kind of creepy, otherworldly element, I want a human, tangible explanation for it.
Home Before Dark by Riley Sager meets that requirement...mostly.
Home renovator and interior decorator Maggie Holt has returned to Baneberry Hall, a huge, overgrown mansion that was her childhood home, though only for a few weeks before her parents fled in terror. Her father found fame in subsequently writing the tale of that short tenure in House of Horrors, chapters from which are interspersed with Maggie's account in the present day. The reader flips back and forth between Mr. Ewan Holt's account, as it unspools day by day, and Maggie's in the wake of her father's death decades later. (And both parts are compelling, which often isn't the case in books with two narratives threaded together). Despite his warning to never return to Baneberry Hall, Maggie's father also never sold the sprawling house, and he never told Maggie the truth of what happened before the family abandoned it when she was young. He has always claimed that his account is true (which is full of ghosts, mysteriously ringing bells, ancient record players and chandeliers that turn on in the night, armoire doors flying open, etc.) Maggie doesn't believe it, but she can't remember much, either.
Many characters populate the pages, and sometimes they are challenging to keep track of, as the house has spawned generational tragedies involving fathers and daughters.
The book contains many scary scenes (it would make a great movie, with so many scares just outside of the screen's frame jumping out), but its most memorable involves a horde of writhing snakes, vividly described.
I did NOT figure out the ending - and Sager presents one plausible ending, which is supplanted by two subsequent endings that upend the previous conclusions. Are ghosts the culprits? Or someone or something else? I can't say more!
The book contains a lot of the "f word," though far less than the average thriller you might flip through today.
