Home before dark

 Author: Riley Sager 

Genre: Mystery/Thriller, Paranormal

Original publication date: June 30, 2020 

Book description: 
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

Thoughts:

This book was picked up as part of the Literally Dead Book club so when I picked it up I knew very little about it other than it was about a woman returning to a house her family lived during her childhood that was said to be haunted. 

This story is told in two perspectives, a very popular style in Mystery-thrillers really ut it is not 100% helpful, we see snips of the book her father wrote and she is very certain that it was all made up so it does not count in her head. It works pretty nicely, you see a chapter from Maggie as she finds out about the house as part of her inheritance and decides to explore it. The house itself is in a dark veil, as her parents insist she does not return there.

Maggie is very stubborn and selfish, or at least she was not my favorite protagonist. Her love for her parents is very hard to understand, she claims to love them but she continuously describes them as liars and blames them for everything in her life that went amiss. Not entirely blameless but still I felt she was very complicated when it came to her feelings for them. She does not want to live in the dark anymore, and in her quest to find out what happened there all those years ago decides to go to the house and live in it with the excuse of fixing it up and selling the property.

This book is wonderful at weaving the mystery, the personal struggles of a lonely woman, and the slight touches of the paranormal. Maggie does not believe the house is haunted, she makes that pretty clear since she is introduced. But the doubt is still there, the family left in a hurry after only living in a Mansion that had used up all their savings for only a few weeks. The question still stands why?

Like any old house, it has history and the Manor they lived in had its fair share of misfortunes throughout the years. Maggie investigates but she does not have a nice stay in the house, things start to happen. The things described in the book, start to happen to Maggie in a way and that makes you jumpy but it is still not full-on horror,  it gives it just a bit of scare factor. 

They only help to build up the expectation, if you have the time I'm sure you'll wish to read the whole book in a day or two. I really enjoy my time with it that I read it in a single day pretty much. I just did not put it away until I reached the end.

The book is set out to surprise not to scare, so yeah if you are looking for a horror book, this is not it. It is more of a mystery thriller. It comes with a few plot twists that you might have not seen coming, at least you can't see them all coming. For 3/4 of it you think the story is going a specific way but then a plot twist, then a big reveal, and then another reveal. It is amazing the number of discoveries Maggie makes towards the last few chapters. 

I loved the wow factor, and of course, it still feels overly convenient and unrealistic but it makes for such a good ride. The ending is very convenient, to tell the truth, but as you are reading it makes the read compelling and you simply do not want to put it down.

This is the first Riley Sager book I read, now I need to go back and find his previous works and catch up. I hope to enjoy them all greatly.