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.

Other precursors to Home Before Dark include The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, both by Shirley Jackson; The Turn of the Screw by Henry James; Beloved by Toni Morrison; and Hell House by Richard Matheson. In addition, Home Before Dark contains themes of psychological horror from films like George Cukor’s Gaslight, in which a husband tries to manipulate his wife into thinking that she’s experiencing psychosis.

The existence of the ghouls is a real-life trope of modern horror—tourists flock to places with morbid histories. The mansion where the Manson murders took place in the Hollywood Hills is still a popular destination for occult enthusiasts, as is the Amityville House. Ghost tours are popular in places like New Orleans, a city famed for its occult underpinnings, and ghost legends often surround battlefields like Gettysburg, which have seen great amounts of death.

Some of the tropes from traditional haunted house horror have made their way into other mediums too. For instance, the video game Fatal Frame uses a similar technique of tracking ghosts through the shutter of a camera lens. Other horror homages like Sam Raimi’s film Drag Me to Hell gleefully employ most of the same clichés, while also demonstrating why those clichés remain a source of enjoyment.

Despite the multitude of novels in existence, there are only so many stories that can be told. All love stories share similar themes and tropes, as do comedies, tragedies, existential and Borgesian fables, coming-of-age narratives, and revenge fantasies. They continue to succeed and endure precisely because they’re essential, thematic pieces of what it means to be human. Horror novels are no exception because they reflect humans’ fascination with things that are scary, difficult to explain, or indicative of other realms of existence.