A great way to start off the month of spooky reviews and short stories, is with Riley Sager’s most recent novel! This was had a lot of spooky vibes and I am so glad it was what I brought in the month with.

Synopsis: (From Goodreads)

What was it like? Living in that house?

Maggie Holt is used to such questions. Twenty-five years ago, she and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. They spent three weeks there before fleeing in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a nonfiction book called House of Horrors. His tale of ghostly happenings and encounters with malevolent spirits became a worldwide phenomenon, rivaling The Amityville Horror in popularity—and skepticism.

Today, Maggie is a restorer of old homes and too young to remember any of the events mentioned in her father’s book. But she also doesn’t believe a word of it. Ghosts, after all, don’t exist. When Maggie inherits Baneberry Hall after her father’s 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 aren’t thrilled that their small town has been made infamous thanks to Maggie’s father. Even more unnerving is Baneberry Hall itself—a place filled with relics from another era that hint at a history of dark deeds. As Maggie experiences strange occurrences straight out of her father’s book, she starts to believe that what he wrote was more fact than fiction.

Review: This book was nice and spooky! It was exactly what I needed for the beginning of October.

What I first fell in love with was the alternating chapters. It goes back and forth between the book that Maggie Holt’s father wrote, and the current story of Maggie and her return to the house.

This was a lot of fun to read because each chapter built on the one before and led into the one next. It really kept the momentum rolling and the suspense high.

There were many parts of this book that were creepy and chilling. Riley Sager did a great job of creating vivid scenes and complex situations. He had moments of imagery that allowed the suspense to build and my imagination to go wild.

This is my first Riley Sager novel and I hope it won’t be my last.

Have you read Home Before Dark? Think you will be adding it to your own creepy book list?

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Happy spooky reading!