... 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.
... outstanding ... Sager, who makes the house a palpable, threatening presence, does a superb job of anticipating and undermining readers’ expectations. Haunted house fans will be in heaven.
Horror aficionados will feel quite cozy as they settle into this narrative, and Sager’s fans will recognize a familiar formula. As he has in his previous three novels, the author makes contemporary fiction out of time-honored tropes. Final Girls (2017) remains his most fresh and inventive novel, but his latest is significantly more satisfying than the two novels that followed ... Sager delivers something like a cross between The Haunting of Hill House and The Amityville Horror with a tough female protagonist ... The ghosts and poltergeist activity Sager conjures are truly chilling, and he does a masterful job of keeping readers guessing until the very end. As was the case with past novels, though, Sager sets his story in the present while he seems to be writing about the past ... Sager is already asking readers to suspend disbelief, and he makes that more difficult because it’s such a jolt when a character pulls out an iPhone or mentions eBay. This is, however, a minor complaint about what is a generally entertaining work of psychological suspense ... A return to form for this popular author.
