Home Before Dark

Description

Price: $19.00 - $10.28
(as of Jul 20, 2024 22:01:42 UTC – Details)

By: Riley Sager (Author)

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • One…

Reviews

  1. lr2k

    Fantastic read!!!
    I have become a huge fan of Riley Sager. I read The Only One Left Right before this book, both fantastic, this I liked better! Really well written, to me, a suspenseful gothic style horror thriller with a potentially haunted mansion and everything. Five stars! A thrilling read! Off to the next Riley Sager book!

  2. FaithOryx

    Highly Enjoyable and Lots of Bumps in the Night
    I’ve read all four of Riley Sager’s novels. I’ve liked them all and thought all four would make fantastic movies. But I think Home Before Dark is his best work to date. It’s not as throwback or fun as Final Girls and it didn’t have the same romantic ambiance of Lock Every Door, but this one was really balanced and well crafted. There’s something about Sager’s work I’ve realized the fourth time in. His work always seems “familiar” to me, as though I’ve read or seen the concept before. But I actually had a realization in this book that this style may actually be on purpose. I actually love a homage and, in this book, it’s just too obvious to miss. So yes, it’s like an idea you’ve seen, but a completely fresh angle.In this one we have Maggie, a thirty year old interior designer, who is famous for being the surviving child/victim in a non-fiction book written by her father about a haunting they experience in a rambling Victorian home they lived in 25 years prior. The book has defined her and she despises it. She has no memory of the actual events and is convinced her dad made the whole thing up just to profit. And profit they have. The money has paid for her education and their lives and she’s just inherited the entire share after her father’s death…. including the house itself.She makes the decision to go back to the house, despite a death bed promise to her father that she won’t, and her mother’s insistence as well (who offers to buy the house off her, as she’s now remarried to a realtor). There was a tiny lapse in logic here. It was clear her parents are desperate for her to NOT return to the house. So I found it amazing they left it to her in the estate. But lapse of logic aside, and putting myself in Maggie’s shoes, I would ABSOLUTELY go back to the house to see if I could figure out what happened. Especially to see if the memories would come back from living in the house.So off she goes with a double agenda. To realize the mysteries of her past while being productive and renovate the house to sell. The cast of characters from her perspective is largely limited to the people from the book itself, people her family knew as a child… neighbors, police, locals, etc. She has a female friend and business partner but that interaction is limited to cell phone communications. The friend, Allie, was the weakest link character as she only serves as a plot device to give updates and is not a realized character.Another Riley Sager style is the flashbacks. I did not like the device in Lock Every Door (the story is told from the same character’s POV but from a future self and a current self told side by side). But in this book, it really worked. As Maggie is going through the motions of the current day mystery, etc., we get to read portions of her father’s book in which she is the main character. So her father, in present day deceased, is the other main character and his story of the haunting is told from his perspective. There was only one moment I lost track of the POVs but, overall, Sager did a great job of giving both characters a unique voice.I had a small issue with the ending simply because it was super rushed. Just BAM, BAM, BAM. That being said, Sager pulls off the difficulty of giving us a satisfying ending in a horror novel. And, yes, I’ve seen the other reviews in which it’s questioned if this is a horror novel. I say, yes, absolutely. It’s more horror than any other genre. I would not expect to be “scared” as it’s not that type of novel. It’s more like atmospheric horror with a mystery at the center. And it leaves enough open that we are left to wonder and question, while still being given a very solid conclusion.Overall highly recommended if you love all the stuff I love… old Victorian houses, trips to libraries to do research, mysteries and investigations, old love letters, family and town folklore, ghosts, etc. I think this book is a real treat and absolutely to be enjoyed.

  3. Sara Pack

    Easy read.
    Riley sager does amazing jobs with his thriller books that keep you wanting yo read more. This book gave lots a good jump scares, and had great twist and turns. However the ending will leave you with unanswered questions.

  4. Bob Lewis

    Gripping, but with a couple flaws
    I love a good haunted house story. And as a skeptic myself, albeit one with a love for supernatural fiction, I also love a story that’s about the search for truth behind apparently supernatural events. This book ticks all those boxes, so I dug into it with great eagerness. What I found was a book that kept me thoroughly entertained throughout–I read it in a single day, with only a couple short breaks–but nevertheless had a couple flaws.Let’s start with the good stuff. The writing is top quality, and the pacing is definitely on point. The characters are reasonably well-developed, and the dual (past and present) story lines manage to work surprisingly well (though the narrative voice is perhaps a bit too similar between the alternating sections). I particularly like the way the author manages to simultaneously build suspense and keep the reader flip-flopping regarding what actually happened, and the blend of supernatural and skeptical is both intriguing and narratively effective.However, I have two complaints. First, the story starts off feeling a bit too familiar. Family flees haunted house, writes a book, and their adult child returns decades later to find out what really happened. Following numerous real-world scandals involving families’ fraudulent claims of supernatural terrors in their homes, this plot has become well-trod. That doesn’t mean it can’t be effective, but it does mean that, while we might enjoy the same old tropes, if a book really wants to stand out, it needs to bring something new to the table. Early on, it doesn’t really look like this book will bring anything new to the table. The first half or so reads like a well told version of the story, but fundamentally the same old story none the less. However, fortunately, though I won’t spoil exactly what they are, there are some twists, beginning about halfway through the book, that call the familiar into question and leave the reader guessing and turning the pages right until the ending.The ending itself is a mixed bag, however. Again, I won’t spoil anything, but I find myself conflicted between acknowledging that the novel’s conclusion certainly does wrap everything up and feeling like some of the revelations, offered in fairly rapid succession in the book’s final chapters, while logically sound, still undercut some of the book’s tension. I’ve said many times (in reviews of other books and films, and in other places) that ending a horror novel is a tricky business, because it requires balancing the reader’s need for narrative closure against the simple fact that the unknown is scarier than the known. This novel definitely suffers from the same problem. It’s not that the ending is entirely unsatisfactory–it actually does a good job of concluding the story–but rather that once the reader has too much information, the story simply isn’t all that scary any more.All that having been said, despite my couple of complaints (which I guess can be viewed as one complaint resolving the other), I found this to be an excellent novel on the whole, and I’d recommend it for anyone looking for a good spooky tale.

  5. Amanda

    Spooky and then it all unraveled
    I thoroughly enjoyed the haunting aspect of the book and would have enjoyed the aspect throughout the book, but the ending does make the revelation that not everything is caused my the spookiness of the setting. I do feel like there was a loose end untied about Dane but oh well

  6. mckenzie

    A good read.

  7. Michelly Rabelo Tranalli

    No começo achei um pouco arrastado, mas tudo se fez necessário para a história e seu desfecho!!! A cada momento a gente acha que está conseguindo solucionar, descobrir os entraves, mas é instigante até a última página!!!! Adorei e recomendo!!! Para quem lê em inglês o vocabulário é tranquilo!!!

  8. Cliente de KindleDAQ

    Me ha gustado muchisimo esta novela,imposible despegarse de ella hasta terminarla. Muy absorbente, con una trama llena de giros inesperados y un final increible

  9. An incredible discovery. These have changed how I can dress in Winter. Comfortable and extremely warm. An absolutely must have in a European winter!

    Absolutely loved this book. I had no idea how it would end. Really cleverly written between the past and the present. Another hit from the author Riley Sager!

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