kinzzy_brooke 's review for:

Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

5.0

dark mysterious tense medium-paced

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I started off the book thinking that it was just typical horror tropes that you see every movie, but it quickly turned into something more intricate and went somewhere I didn’t see coming. I loved how this book was dually narrated. It went back and forth between the present, narrated by the main character Maggie, and the past—narrated by her father. 

Maggie goes back to the haunted house her and her family fled when she was a child after she’s left the house in her father’s will. And you start to believe what happened in her father’s book is starting to come true again because the same exact things start happening to her. It makes you wonder who’s the reliable narrator here. But then it takes so many twists at the end of the story, you’re left with something completely different than your typical ghost story. 

Going from a horror to a murder mystery book, I thought I was going to like it less because it would have less supernatural twists, but I actually loved all of the twists of who the killer was. I mean after the (what? Fourth?) reveal of it being Maggie I was actually starting to believe it. Even as she crawled up the stairs, I really thought she was just overcome with grief and shock. But the reveals of her “ghosts” she saw as a child actually being real people who snuck into the house through the armoire might actually be creepier than any haunt. I’m still like Maggie though, I really want to believe that it was Petra at the top of the stairs with her mom, getting the end to her story. Maybe then, she finally got peace.