For anyone looking for the perfectly eerie haunted read for this long weekend, Home Before Dark by Riley Sager hits in all the right ways. Suspenseful, dark, mysterious, and psychologically jarring, this haunted house thriller will keep you up late into the night turning pages with a flashlight in hand.

Twenty-five years ago, Maggie Holt was a five-year-old only child whose family had just moved into a historic home in scenic Vermont with a long, dark past. The original owners in the 1800s lost their teenage daughter suddenly and tragically after her failed attempt to run away with a forbidden love interest, setting in motion years of trauma spanning the following century: fatal accidents on the property, unexplained sightings, and eventually the murder-suicide carried out by the father of the home’s most recent family. Maggie begins seeing people no one else can see, and strange things start happening throughout the house, culminating in one final terrifying night that drives the family away for good.

In the present day, a now thirty-year-old Maggie doesn’t actually remember living in the home. All she knows is that her father became a bestselling author after writing the country’s most famous ghost story based on the few weeks they spent at Baneberry Hall. Maggie believes her father fabricated the entire story, so when he dies and leaves her the property, she returns to uncover what really happened the night they fled. What she discovers is more haunting than any book her father could have written.

There were so many insane twists throughout this plot that I genuinely could not predict where Sager was taking the story next, but every reveal landed explosively and brilliantly. You truly have no idea what the truth is until the final stretch of the novel. This book ties together family trauma and childhood fear in a way that feels deeply unsettling and impossible to stop reading.

Baneberry Hall is easily one of my favorite settings I’ve read in a thriller. It gave me the same kind of vibes as The Haunting of Hill House. (I still haven’t read The Haunting of Hill House yet, but I’ve seen the Netflix series loosely based on it, and this house reminds me of that one.) Sager creates this creepy environment filled with antiques, hidden history, and century-old clues that are easy for the reader to visualize around them.

This was my first time reading a Riley Sager novel, and honestly, I’m hooked. I already want to pick up another one of his books, so if anyone has recommendations for which one I should read next, let me know!