Home Before Dark

The scariest movies I’ve ever seen were Rosemary’s Baby and The Amityville Horror. I’m frightened, but darkly intrigued by blend of lies and secrets with supernatural horror. Plus, no gore. (My distaste for blood and gore is extra funny, since my husband is a horror writer.)  Lock Every Door was Riley Sager’s Rosemary’s Baby, not a direct retelling by any means, but a suspense novel with similar themes and beats. Now, his Home Before Dark brings The Amityville Horror to mind.

In Home Before Dark, Maggie’s father turned their weeks living in Baneberry Hall into a famous tell-all book about the real haunting they experienced. It’s basically The Amityville Horror, culminating in the family escaping in the middle of the night, never to return. Maggie was only 5, and although she’s a key figure in the book about the haunting, she remembers almost nothing from this time. When her father dies, she discovers than he never sold the house, and he left it to her.

Maggie rehabs and flips old houses for a living (I know, right? The shrink thought it was an interesting career path for a little girl from a haunted house, too.) and she decides to go back to Baneberry (I know, right? Her mom tried to talk her out of it, too.) to fix it up.

Of course, Maggie almost immediately starts finding strange things at the house. Baneberry Hall is almost too perfectly creepy.  It’s got all the haunted-house standards, with generations of dark secrets, laconic New England caretakers, poisonous baneberries and a graveyard on the property, mysterious sounds, just everything. There’s a fascinating dual storyline, with chapters alternating between Maggie’s time in the house, as an adult, and her dad’s book about the house, both describing strange events.

I have a spoiler-filled theory about the ending of Home Before Dark, but only click if you’ve already read the book!

I enjoyed this one, although not quite as much as Lock Every Door. There’s the same strong suspense in both novels, but I think that upscale Manhattan facade in Lock Every Door, with dark exploitation underneath, is more my style than creepy countryside of Home Before Dark.