The following version of the novel was used to create this study guide: Sager, Riley. Home Before Dark. Dutton, June 30, 2020. Kindle.

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. Twenty-five years later, Maggie remembers nothing about the experience that is not colored by the novel, House of Horrors. 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.

On Ewan Holt’s deathbed, he warned his daughter, Maggie, that it was not safe for her to return to Baneberry Hall. He made her promise she would not go back there. 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. 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. She advises Maggie to have a third party assess the value of the house so Maggie will not have to go there in person.

Instead, Maggie, who is building a career renovating and flipping homes, decides to take on the job of renovating the house herself. She hopes to discover the truth of what happened all those years ago to make her and her family flee for their lives. Shortly after Maggie arrives at Baneberry Hall, she discovers two unsettling bits of information. The groundskeeper tells her that her father visited Baneberry Hall every year on July 15, the day the family left. This is disturbing because Ewan swore that he and his family would never return to the house. 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. Maggie could not help but believe these two things were connected in some way.

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. Sager alternates one chapter from each novel so the reader can compare Maggie and Ewan’s experiences. 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. Ewan builds his novel on two “ghosts” Maggie claimed as a child she saw coming and going in her room through an armoire: Miss Pennyface and Mister Shadow.

Maggie’s novel reaches a climax when her mother joins her at Baneberry Hall and tells Maggie that Maggie killed Petra by pushing her down the stairs one night when Petra was babysitting her. Petra had sneaked out of her mother’s house to babysit, so her mother was not aware of where she was. Jess tells Maggie that they fled the house, pretending it was haunted to keep Maggie from being convicted of murder. They put Petra’s body in a canvas bag and hid it in a secret compartment below the floor of the room above the kitchen. It had stayed there until Dane unwittingly discovered it. Overwhelmed by what her mother is telling her, Maggie orders her mother out of the house.

Maggie walks to her room, the same room she stayed in when she was a child and attempts to go to sleep. She is not feeling well. The doors to an armoire, from which Maggie had always told her father the ghosts came, open and the ghost Maggie had always called Miss Pennyface appears. As an adult, Maggie recognizes Miss Pennyface as Marta Carver, a woman who had lived in Baneberry Hall before Maggie’s family. Marta’s husband had smothered their daughter and then killed himself, giving the house a reputation. Ewan’s book played upon this reputation. Marta told Maggie that it had been a long time since they had met like that, suggesting that she was one of the “ghosts” Maggie claimed she had seen in her room. Marta had earlier given Maggie what she said was a cherry pie, a gift of friendship and forgiveness. Maggie had been eating the pie while talking to her mother. Marta informs Maggie the pie also had baneberries, a poisonous berry for which the house was named, in it.

Marta tells Maggie that she felt bad about what happened to Petra. Petra had come into Maggie’s room and discovered Marta there. Petra recognized Marta. Not wanting Petra to tell anyone that Marta had been sneaking into the house through a secret passage behind the armoire to watch Maggie as she slept, Marta pushed Petra down the stairs, killing her. Marta has come back to kill Maggie. She fears that Maggie will figure out the truth about what happened. Marta tries to smother Maggie with a pillow, but Maggie has enough strength to roll onto her side and get away.

Because she is so sick from the baneberries, Maggie falls down the stairs. She is looking up the stairs toward Marta when she sees another “ghost” from her past, Mister Shadow, appear behind Marta. Mister Shadow, it turns out, is Elsa Ditmer, Petra’s mother. Elsa is an old lady and is suffering from Alzheimer's, but she heard Marta’s confession and understands it was Marta