A woman returns to the house made famous by her father's bestselling horror memoir. Is the place really haunted by evil forces, as her father claimed? Or are there more earthbound-and dangerous-secrets hidden within its walls?
... no straightforward novel ... Sager's novel is packed with the expected horror-trope-tinged suspense, literary jump-scares and more than one twist, but its best moments are the quiet ones exploring the history of the house, comparing the truths Maggie learns with what her father wrote and coming to terms with what it all means anyway for Maggie and her family ... starts more slowly than Sager's previous thrillers, but all the best ghost stories do.
Sager weaves these stories together, chapter by chapter, until Ewan’s chapters end. Sager then wraps up Maggie’s side of the story with very neat details that make sense and leave the reader with a satisfactory ending ... Although the multiple first-person points of view (written in different print fonts) can at times be distracting, Sager has laid out an exciting story that is hard to put down.
... the author puts a fresh, clever spin on horror tropes, this time with echoes of The Amityville Horror and The Haunting of Hill House. And he amps up the tension by alternating chapters of Ewan’s book with Maggie’s musings, thus putting the past and present on a collision course that readers can, but our heroine cannot, see. Home Before Dark is a compelling and layered mix of taut psychological suspense, genuinely scary haunted-house terrors and the vagaries of memory, capped off with an inventive and satisfyingly wild ending.
