Home Before Dark

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-12

Chapters 13-16

Chapters 17-20

Chapters 21-28

Chapters 29-32

Chapters 33-40

Chapter 41-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 17-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 17 Summary

Maggie sees movement outside a window as a figure flees into the woods. She runs into the trees in pursuit with a flashlight and passes through the cemetery to a high wall. She finds a crumbling breach in the wall, which must be where the ghouls enter the property. When she steps through the opening, she sees the back of a yellow cottage. She returns to Baneberry Hall, takes the knife, and searches the house before tearing a page from the Book and putting it in the crack of the front door. She remembers that her father was disappointed when she started the business with Allie, because it meant that she wouldn’t be a writer. Maggie was always friendly with her father until the Book came up—she then grew cold, even though it hurt her to keep him at a distance. She remembers when he began cutting off all media and retreating into his home, where he watched old movies and read books that he loved. Maggie puts a page of the book in every window, takes a valium, and locks herself in her room with the knife.

Chapter 18 Summary: “July 2—Day 7”

Ewan doesn’t sleep. At 4:45am, as usual, he hears the thud. Unsurprisingly, the chandelier is glowing, but the thread, chalk, and index cards are undisturbed. He makes coffee, but when he takes a sip, something moves in the mug. A baby snake drops out onto the table, and two more come through a hole in the kitchen ceiling. Then, a grown snake drops onto the table and tries to get into the coffee mug. He screams when the ceiling collapses and more snakes fall through. They bite at him as Maggie and Jessica come downstairs. The family immediately leaves for a hotel. Two weeks later, they leave for the last time.

Chapter 19 Summary

Maggie is half awake, “[i]n the grey” (175), as her father called it. The armoire opens, and she sees a man inside. Mister Shadow runs out and says she’ll die. Maggie’s wakes and opens the doors: The armoire is empty. However, it feels like a memory, not a nightmare. Nevertheless, she knows that she can’t remember something if it didn’t happen, which would mean that she’s remembering something that could only have existed in the book. However, her father never wrote a scene about her seeing Mister Shadow in the armoire.

Dane arrives at eight o’ clock that morning, and she’s irrationally suspicious of him. He alone knows about the record player, and he probably knows about the gap in the wall. He tells her the brown cottage is his, so the yellow one—which she saw through the breach—belongs to the Ditmers. He says the breach has been there for decades. He asks about the water stain on the kitchen ceiling and pushes on the plaster. Maggie pictures the snakes spilling out. When he punches through the plaster, a section gives way, and a sack falls down onto the table. Maggie turns it over, and human bones spill out, including a skull with fragments of tissue. She looks into its eye sockets and knows that this is why her family left.

Chapter 20 Summary: “July 3—Day 8”

Over the phone, Jessica threatens to sue Junie Jane. In the aftermath of the snakes and the kitchen ceiling, they stay at the Two Pines while they think. Alcott visits to tell them the house is clear and the snakes are gone. When they return, the kitchen is destroyed, and the smell is horrible. Ewan wants to leave, but they can’t afford the loss.

Chapters 17-20 Analysis

These chapters serve primarily as devices to lead Maggie to the discovery of Petra’s skeleton, which also provides the revelation of the kitchen ceiling’s significance. In addition, this section brings House of Horrors to its halfway point, when the family flees to the Twin Pines Hotel: “Now we were faced with nothing but reality. It had taken just over a week for the dream of Baneberry Hall to curdle into a nightmare” (184).

Chapter 19 shows the line between Maggie’s grasp of reality and memory beginning to slip. After waking from what seems to be a nightmare about Mister Shadow, she thinks about it logically:

I can’t remember something that never happened. Which means it’s the book I’m remembering. A sound theory, if my father hadn’t written it in first person. The reader sees everything through his eyes, and I’ve read House of Horrors too many times to know my father never wrote such a scene (177).

For Maggie, one of the Book’s most annoying is that it includes only Ewan’s perspective. He’d never have included a scene from Maggie’s point of view, which makes her wonder if she actually saw Mister Shadow in the armoire. The theme of House of Horrors and Maggie’s Search for an Identity shines brightly in these passages.

The discovery of the skeleton in the kitchen ceiling removes the possibility that the story of sinister activities in the house was only a product of Ewan’s imagination. Maggie understands that they left because of the skeleton, but that doesn’t mean that the house is haunted or that anything in the Book is true, again highlighting the themes of The Value and Burden of Family and The Corrosive Effects of Secrets and Guilt.