For instance, Sager presents a chapter that Ewan writes about a nest of snakes falling through the kitchen ceiling followed by a chapter in which Dane Hibbets, who is helping Maggie with the renovation, pokes through the same spot in the ceiling, causing a bag holding the remains of Petra to fall through the ceiling. Sager alternates one chapter from each novel so the reader can compare Maggie and Ewan’s experiences. Sager’s novel is composed of the text from Ewan’s novel and the text from a novel that Maggie writes about her experience at Baneberry Hall, telling the truth about what happened there. Maggie could not help but believe these two things were connected in some way. Maggie also learns that Petra Ditmer, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the housekeeper, had disappeared the same day that her family fled the home. This is disturbing because Ewan swore that he and his family would never return to the house. The groundskeeper tells her that her father visited Baneberry Hall every year on July 15, the day the family left. Shortly after Maggie arrives at Baneberry Hall, she discovers two unsettling bits of information. She hopes to discover the truth of what happened all those years ago to make her and her family flee for their lives. Instead, Maggie, who is building a career renovating and flipping homes, decides to take on the job of renovating the house herself. She advises Maggie to have a third party assess the value of the house so Maggie will not have to go there in person. When Maggie’s mother, Jess, learns Ewan had left Maggie the house in his will, she and her new husband, a contractor, offer to buy it.

For that reason, she was surprised to learn that her father still owned the house and that she had inherited it from him as well as the profits from the book, House of Horrors, he had written about the twenty days her family lived there.

He made her promise she would not go back there. On Ewan Holt’s deathbed, he warned his daughter, Maggie, that it was not safe for her to return to Baneberry Hall. When she learns that her father left Baneberry Hall to her in his will, she decides to spend a summer there to determine what really happened. Twenty-five years later, Maggie remembers nothing about the experience that is not colored by the novel, House of Horrors. In the psychological thriller Home Before Dark by Riley Sager, Maggie Holt feels as if her life has been lived in the shadow of the horror novel her father wrote about the twenty days they spent in the allegedly haunted Baneberry Hall.

The following version of the novel was used to create this study guide: Sager, Riley.

Synopsis of home before dark novel