by Todd Ritter
4.5 · 4 reviewsTHE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • One of USA Today's Best Books of 2020 “A haunted house story—with a twist….[Sager] does not hold back”(Rolling Stone) in this chilling thriller from the auth…
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • One of USA Today's Best Books of 2020 “A haunted house story—with a twist….[Sager] does not hold back”(Rolling Stone) in this chilling thriller from the author of Final Girls and Survive the Night. Every house has a story to tell and a secret to share. Twenty-five years ago, Maggie Holt and her parents moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. Three weeks later they fled in the dead of night, an ordeal her father recounted in a memoir called House of Horrors. His story of supernatural happenings and malevolent spirits became a worldwide phenomenon, rivaling The Amityville Horror in popularity—and skepticism. Maggie was too young to remember any of the horrific events that supposedly took place, and as an adult she doesn’t believe a word of her father’s claims. Ghosts, after all, don’t exist.
4 reviews
Underneath the ghosts it's about a daughter trying to work out whether her dad was a liar. That's what kept me reading.
If you want supernatural terror it hedges. If you want a tense mystery with gothic trappings it's excellent. I was happy either way.
I read the last hundred pages with every light on. The twist about what really happened in that house is properly satisfying and plays fair with the clues.
Maggie returning to the house her father wrote a bestselling ghost memoir about, to find out how much of it was true, is such a smart structure. Alternating her present with chapters of his book is genuinely creepy.