This novel has alternating chapters between her father’s account in the House of Horrors before they fled in the death of the night after a mere 20 days and Maggie’s stay there. Trust me when I tell you don’t want to go asleep when you start reading this :-).

I loved the historical, tragic background of the house, its haunting look (from the windows that look like eyes to the mention of poisonous baneberries all around the house in the past so it looked like a sea of blood) and hearing about all of the unusual events. Riley Sager outdid himself in creating the atmosphere and the reporting of the strange events that happened at Baneberry Hall. Maggie didn’t know what to believe either and although she’s trying to make sense of everything in a logical way, we were both just flailing about. So many strange things were happening though at Baneberry Hall, both in the past and in the present so many years later, that I actually started to waver and the door to believing the impossible was cracked open a teensy tiny bit. Maggie is a non-believer, like me, so we were off to a good start. If I can’t trust him, then there’s really nobody else, and guess what, looking at the rating on top you could say that I finally found a good, better yet a great ghost story. After several tries and misses I know it’s better to avoid these kind of stories but I loved Riley Sager’s previous novels so much that I put my faith in him for that one last try. I can hardly believe I’m saying this but this girl here (ok woman, whatever) actually enjoyed a ghost story! Believe me that it takes a writer with very special skills to make me love a ghostly novel. And that she might be in danger all over again. That, either way, someone – or something – doesn’t want her here. Even more unnerving is Baneberry Hall itself – a place that hints of dark deeds and unexplained happenings.Īs the days pass, Maggie begins to believe that what her father wrote was more fact than fiction. People from the pages of her father’s book lurk in the shadows, and locals aren’t thrilled that their small town has been made infamous.

Ghosts, after all, don’t exist.īut when she returns to Baneberry Hall to prepare it for sale, her homecoming is anything but warm. She was too young to remember any of the events mentioned in her father’s book.

Now, Maggie has inherited Baneberry Hall after her father’s death. His tale of ghostly happenings and encounters with malevolent spirits became a worldwide phenomenon. They spent three weeks there before fleeing in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a memoir called House of Horrors. Twenty-five years ago, she and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved into a rambling Victorian estate called Baneberry Hall.

Home before dark by riley sager