
Home Before Darkcombines a psychological thriller by Riley Sager style with the haunted house horror to offer an intriguing tale about dark family secrets. The story is told in two timelines: the investigation Maggie Holt decides to undertake into her past and that of her family, contrasting the novel-length manuscript written by her father about their ill-fated turn at Baneberry Hall.
Twenty-five years ago, Maggie and her family moved into Baneberry Hall. The family was forced to leave after believing the house to be haunted by ghostly figures on horses. Maggie later grew up to her father writing an all-time best-selling memoir about their supposed experience with those ghosts, claiming that they saw apparitions and other menacing things that forced them out.
As an adult Maggie is a home flipper, and she has few memories of their stay in Baneberry Hall, but she doubts the story her father wrote forever. When her father dies, she inherits his house and comes back — determined to figure out what really happened to her family. In renovating the house and investigating its sordid history, Maggie comes to experience certain eerie and unexplainabvle events that bear an uncanny resemblance to her father’s book, incidents that blur the line betwen fiction and fact.
Switching between Maggie’s present-day narration and chapters from her father’s book), this haunting dual mystery stretches across decades and may or may not be a ghost story, but humans have been murdering other humans for a long time.

Key Themes
The Haunted House and the Ghost:Baneberry Hall is a truly creepy haunted house with all the classic haunted house stuff in there, flickering lights, weird noises, tragic murder.
Memory and Trauma:The falsification of memoryby Maggie echoes the broader idea that trauma taints all perception.
Family Secrets:This explores the broken relationship between Maggie and her family, and most importantly why her father decided to write the memoir.
You should read “Home Before Dark” because it provides the following benefits:
Spine-Tingling Atmosphere:Sager employs. a visceral atmosphere of dread and suspense throughout the novel Baneberry Hall, a brooding Victorian mansion in rural vermont at metabook24 — with its creaking floorboards and ghostly entities lurking around every corner — is the type of setting that sucks readers into a possibility-laden world where nothing is what it seems, comfortable hazy evenings unfold at an excruciatingly measured pace, and every detail can be both clue or red herring. Readers looking for a certain mood in their haunted house stories will also find it here, an atmospheric read that surrounds you with the sort of eeriness you might find so easy to see living in such a locale.
That is largely due to the dual narrative structure, one of which: Maggie’s present day retrospective – isn’t badly written on its own but feels incongruous with the mythopoetic lens through which her father writes in his not-memoirs. Such a structure works to play the reveal straight by encouraging audiences to see each of these through opposite lenses and connect the dots as they too try to dissect what is honest and real from fictitious detailsancing structure keeps audience on edge. One thing that kept me going to read the subsequent chapters was how it switched between one chapter to another.

Home Before Dark:The Heavy Psychological Aspects Home Before Dark Is Really About Trauma And Its Influence On Our Individual Lives, But Also Within The Family Bond. The backstory with Maggie having an estranged relationship with her parents, largely due to the issues between them and their father. Through the narrative, Sand Rae also challenges readers to consider how we make sense of truth, memory and the mythologies that guide our lives. It even gives the horror another dimension, becoming more than just a ghost story.
We have very unpredictable twists:Just like all story from Riley Sager, “Home Before Dark” is packed full of the good unexpected twists. The story teases you by playing to your presupposition, dropping revelations one after another about the secrets of Baneberry Hall and its previous guests. Sager keeps everyone on high alert about the events and reveals until the final pages, and if they like mysteries –even readers who go through them in bulk–they’re likely to find themselves blindsided by Sager’s behind-the-curtain wizardry.
MAGGIE. The development of Maggie:a multifaceted, leading lady with realistic qualities who simply wants justice to be served propels the story forward. It narrates the literal and metaphorical journey of her returning to her past during childhood, which is there in ghost form with an unresolved mystery. The townspeople and the other mysterious figures surrounding Baneberry Hall themselves are also fleshed out, yielding intricacies in the story.
Horror and Trackedy Mystery: If you enjoy a little horror with your trackedy mystery, then Home Before Dark proves to be the perfect mix. While the novel is dripping with classic horror cliches (haunted house…mysterious ghostly figures, etc.) it also serves as a smart mystery. With a narrative that reads like a complex, slow-burn thriller with hints of horror thrown in to provoke anticipation and fear, readers who enjoy the best elements of horror can become engrossed in Sager’s skillful entanglement between two different genres.