Home Before Dark

Home Before Dark is an homage to the haunted-house genre of horror fiction and, as a new addition, puts a unique spin on it. Riley Sager notes that the inspiration for the novel came while he was listening to a podcast about the house from The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson (Clarke, James, host. “Riley Sager.” This Book Could Change Your Life, Spotify app, season 1, episode 2. July 2020). Baneberry Hall is similar to the Amityville house in many ways, and both novels contain many of the staples of traditional haunted-house fiction, unlike experimental works such as Mark Z. Danielewski’s Postmodern novel House of Leaves.

Sager employs several tropes of haunted house fiction, but he escapes seeming clichés by incorporating House of Horrors in the book-within-a-book format. House of Horrors includes, among other things, a séance with a Ouija board, paintings with mysteries hidden beneath them, scenes in which investigators poke through library archives to learn about a stigmatized property’s past, odd noises in the night, closet and armoire doors left mysteriously ajar, old-fashioned music as thematic punctuation, a husband’s descent into madness (as in Stephen King’s The Shining), and a family’s final, harried flight from the property while under siege.