Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

  We’re a full week into September and consistent with my personal life but uncharacteristic of my reading habits, we’re into spooky season. In an effort to get me out of my reading routine, Harneet gifted me Home Before Dark by Riley Sager, a horror / mystery novel about a haunted house (which I admit, of the horror tropes, is one of my favourites). The core issues in the novel revolve around family, secrecy, and betrayal, and those themes are woven through the book and revealed through a series of twists. And there are twists galore.

Since the book is largely story-driven, it would be illogical not to give you the synopsis before giving commentary on it. Two stories are presented in alternating chapters throughout the book. In the present, Maggie Holt’s father has died, his final words an apology. In Ewan Holt’s will, though, is Maggie’s childhood home in which she lived for only about twenty days and which she thought was sold as soon as they moved out about twenty-five years earlier. Despite warnings from her parents, Maggie moves into the home and begins her renovations project and also her search for truth. The other chapters are in the past: they are chapters from a book Maggie’s father, Ewan, wrote. A journalist by trade, Ewan bought the haunted house, in part, for its sordid past: a history of murder-suicides, mysterious occurrences, and so on. He then novelized the hauntings that took place there, with a self-playing record player, snakes falling from the ceiling, and violent ghost attacks.

Back to the present: Maggie Holt is trying to parse the small-town politics surrounding Baneberry Hall and figure out why her father kept the house, what secrets were kept from her, and why she has been lied to for all these years. Meanwhile, the hauntings persist: items disappear spontaneously, shadowy figures abound, and the ceiling collapses once again, this time revealing a literal bag of bones instead of snakes.

Home Before Dark proves instructive about some elements of narrative structure. I’d also make an unlikely connection here to Lord of the Rings for a similar issue with the frame narrative. Long ago, I wrote about how when Gandalf comes back from the dead and tells the story of his survival, all of the implicit drama is deflated because you already know he survives. I think a similar issue is true for Home Before Dark, since the book about the haunted house involves characters that we know survived. Well, for the most part. As a result, the hauntings aren’t exactly scary, which should be the focus of a horror novel, no?

There’s also the issue of pacing. In the first two hundred pages or so, very little haunting happens. As I referenced above, there are moments of spookiness, but rather than incremental intensification (turning the screw), it reads as repetitive. How many times do we need to hear the record of The Sound of Music playing mysteriously? I recognize that horror needs to move slowly to build suspense, but the intensity needs to grow, as well, rather than relying on the cheap trick of some spooky foreshadowing at the end of every chapter of Ewan Holt’s book.

The final third of the novel ramps up the action and offers twists at every turn. Some of the twists were visible from a mile away. For instance, one character in the first hundred pages notes that he has never read Ewan’s book (though everyone has). About fifty pages later, a police officer says that anyone who claims not to have read it is a liar. Thus, it was clear that the character who said he had never read it was lying. I was right and it took a while to actually reveal what he was lying about. Other twists are completely unpredictable (e.g. the revelation of a secret passageway in a super obvious place—highlight convenient). Some of the twists seemed of no consequence; one character had dated a murder victim, is presented as the murder, revealed not to be, and then it never explains why he behaved so strangely.

I feel like I had some cognitive dissonance around the twists. I have some mixed feelings about that; on the one hand, things that were clearly implausible had me rolling my eyes. Then, once the twist was revealed, it justified that inconsistency with reality. On the one hand: it’s a great move for the thinking reader. On the other hand: it might just be a cheap trick. Here are two examples, which both involve spoilers—skip to the next paragraph if you’re invested. Spoiler #1: The rules of the ghostly world make no sense. It is eventually revealed in Ewan Holt’s book that the ghost forces men to murder their daughters. It’s unclear, though, why the father has to do it. In one scene, the ghost physically lifts Maggie off the floor and lifts her to the ceiling before dropping her when Ewan threatens self-harm. Why does the ghost need Ewan at all? The ghost could just lift Maggie up and drop her from the highest point in the house. Later, it’s revealed that the book is a lie to protect Maggie, so it makes sense to ham it up for the mass audience, but when you’re reading you think: wtf? Spoiler #2: Home Before Dark reveals the deep secret in one of the last chapters: Ewan’s book was written to protect Maggie because she is a murderer. Rather than let her be exposed as a murderer, it was better to write a book about a haunted house to explain why they had to run away the same time a young girl disappeared. But here’s the thing: first of all, she’s five years old. How could she not remember murdering someone? How could she have thrown a teenager down the stairs? Who in their right mind would prosecute a five year old? All of those circumstances seem absurd for the twist. Of course, there’s a second twist that answers some of these questions, but it’s a little unsatisfying.

What I like more about the book are the more human components of the text. For example, there are the literal hauntings in the book, but more compelling is the way that her father’s book haunts Maggie’s life. I like the fact that the book follows her throughout her life, that others judge her for the book, and that it has formed so much of her identity (a psychologist has to reveal to her that her interior design career might be a way to regain control over the childhood trauma of the haunted house; gee, really?). More than any supernatural element, the human form of haunting is more tangible and compelling.

There’s a great moment early on in the book that involves the secret and flips it. A deathbed revelation of a secret is compelling. When Maggie reveals to her mother that her father still owned the house and left it to her, Maggie’s mom offers to buy it, ostensibly to make Maggie’s life easier. Yet, the immediate suspicion that that arouses is a delightful hook. Why would she want to buy the house that she vows never to return to and tells Maggie never to go to? Despite professing to tell the truth, her mother withholds a secret behind a kind facade.

Something I struggled with throughout the book, though, is how the secrets are addressed. Maggie is constantly looking for clues as to whether her dad’s book was real. She is a complete sceptic that the house is haunted, but then the details from the book start adding up. Maggie vacillates between belief and disbelief all throughout the book. But there’s a flaw in her logic. She seems to believe that if some details are accurate, then the whole book is real, and if one detail is false, then the whole book is fake. It’s a naive take that the book has to be either entirely true or entirely false.

Beyond that, the cast of characters is reasonably well-developed. We’re dealing with a fair number of stock characters, but Sager does identify their specific motivations well in most cases. In the majority of cases, the motivations are plausible and help to explain the mysteries surrounding the house. I imagine that this book is “cozy” in that the stock characters are recognizable enough to be inviting to readers, especially readers of genre fiction. I do appreciate Sager’s restraint with respect to the romantic interest, which deviates from what I think most people will expect.

Ultimately, I think Home Before Dark is interesting for things it doesn’t do. (Cue the scene from The Simpsons where Lisa says jazz is about the notes they don’t play). It seems to be a trope in horror that the haunting starts small and gets incrementally bigger. From a narrative standpoint, that makes a lot of sense and is very satisfying. But, why is it that ghosts have a sense of narrative structure? How come we never get horror stories where the very first haunting is the walls bleeding and eyeballs melting and whatnot? The other thing I think is interesting and has been absent from horror is the epistemic consequences of ghosts. There is always a scene in horror fiction where people go find the truth of the haunting, often by browsing the archives of a library (or in this case the local newspaper). Somehow, history always explains our contemporary ghosts. Yet, why do we assume that ghosts, occupying a different ontological status than the living, occupy the same epistemological position as us? Being able to explain ghosts’ incentives takes away from the horror of a haunting—to me, the incomprehensibility of ghosts’ actions (and that their motives would be completely unknown to us, perhaps we are beneath their notice altogether…) makes for a more sophisticated horror than a facile ghost-wants-revenge. Those are the possibilities I’d want to explore if I ever write my own horror novel.

(Sidenote: it is pretty fun that the ghost rings bells in the house to communicate and that Ewan translates each bell to a letter of the alphabet; that’s a fun, clever idea).

In short, Home Before Dark is a horror-mystery hybrid that I would agree verges on detective fiction more thoroughly towards the end. If you want an entertaining plot-driven narrative, this is probably a good choice for you. There is twist-after-twist-after-twist-after-twist. Harneet wanted to push me out of my comfort zone with this book. In some ways, it has achieved its mission. I’ve read something very different from what I usually read, and, having recently read The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher, I think I was engaging pretty thoughtfully with the narrative possibilities of the genre. I also watched horror movies all summer, so maybe horror literature is the next frontier.

Haunted reading!