Home Before Dark (R)

Trade Paperback

One of USA Todays Best Books of 2020

In this chilling thriller, a woman returns to the house made famous by her fathers bestselling horror memoir. Is the place really haunted by evil forces, as her father claimed? Or are there more earthboundand dangeroussecrets hidden within its walls?

Twenty-five years ago, Maggie Holt and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. Three weeks later they fled in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a nonfiction book called House of Horrors. His horror memoir of ghostly happenings and encounters with malevolent spirits became a worldwide phenomenon, rivaling The Amityville Horror in popularityand skepticism.

Today, Maggie is a restorer of old homes and too young to remember any of the events mentioned in her fathers book. But she also doesnt believe a word of it. Ghosts, after all, dont exist. When Maggie inherits Baneberry Hall after her fathers death, she returns to renovate the place to prepare it for sale. But her homecoming is anything but warm. People from the past, chronicled in House of Horrors, lurk in the shadows. And locals arent thrilled that their small town has been made infamous thanks to Maggies father. Even more unnerving is Baneberry Hall itselfa place filled with relics from another era that hint at a history of dark deeds. As Maggie experiences strange occurrences straight out of her fathers book, she starts to believe that what he wrote was more fact than fiction.

Alternating between Maggies uneasy homecoming and chapters from her fathers book, Home Before Dark is the story of a house with long-buried secrets and a womans quest to uncover themeven if the truth is far more terrifying than any haunting.