Home Before Dark
Maggie Holt grew up inside a bestselling haunted-house memoir her father wrote after their family fled Baneberry Hall in the middle of the night. She has spent her adult life insisting the story is fiction, until her father's death sends her back to the Vermont estate to renovate and sell it, and every chapter of the memoir begins to unfold again around her. Riley Sager alternates Maggie's grown-up investigation with passages from her father's book so the reader is never quite sure which version of the haunting is the honest one.
Where Home Before Dark keeps showing up
Four of our editors' lists feature this novel.
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What you might want to know about Home Before Dark
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Maggie's late father wrote a famous memoir about the haunted house her family fled when she was five. She inherits the place. The book alternates her present-day return with chapters of his old book.
Yes. Home Before Dark is psychological horror with significant haunted-house dread. Riley Sager structures the novel as alternating chapters between a tell-all bestseller about the haunting and the daughter's return to the house decades later.
No. Home Before Dark is a standalone. Riley Sager has written several other standalone thrillers and horror novels, all of which can be read independently.
Home Before Dark was written by Riley Sager, published in 2020 by Penguin Publishing Group.
Home Before Dark is 416 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Home Before Dark takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
Home Before Dark is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
