26 SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2020HOME BEFORE DARK
By Riley Sager
384 pp. Dutton. $27.
Maggie Holt was famous as a kid — famous
because her father, Ewan, wrote a block-
buster best seller chronicling the family’s
experience living in an “Amityville Horror”-
like place in the Vermont woods called
Baneberry Hall.
“I have always been the freaky girl who
once lived in a haunted house,” Maggie recalls. Even as
an adult, she says, “I get emails from strangers... seek-
ing ways to get rid of the ghost they’re certain is trapped
in their cellar,” or “I’ll be contacted by a paranormal
podcast or one of those ghost-hunter shows, asking for
an interview.” Maggie, who was just 5 when she lived at
Baneberry Hall, doesn’t remember much about it. “It’s
like looking at a photograph of a photograph,” she says
of her memories. “The framing is off. The colors are
dulled. The image is slightly dark. Murky.”
“Home Before Dark” is a thriller, so it might not sur-
prise you to learn that Maggie believes her dad made up
the ghost stuff, or that he’s just died and bequeathed her
Baneberry Hall, or that she is about to head to the estate
— alone, of course — to get it ready to sell. In fact, you
might think you know exactly where this story is going
— at least, right up to the point where Maggie drives to
the house through woods swarming with sinister, spiky-
leafed baneberry vines. But it’s here, when the novel
seems as if it’s going to be just another schmaltzy, trope-
laden thriller, that Sager pivots and transforms it into
something fresh, shot through with shocks of real horror.
As he cuts back and forth between chapters of Ewan’s
book and what is happening to Maggie as she begins the
renovation work, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell
which one of them is telling the truth about Baneberry
Hall. Maggie seems no-nonsense, someone who isn’t
going to put up with a pesky poltergeist, but so did
Ewan. His long-ago account chills precisely because it is
told so matter-of-factly.
“Home Before Dark” has its flaws. For one thing, the
dialogue can be screamingly bad: (When Maggie hires a
creepy guy to help her with the construction, she tells
him, “I’ll pay you a fair wage for working on the house.”)
For another, some of the supporting characters are
straight out of central casting. But you’ll probably be
turning the pages too fast to care.
NO SAFE PLACE
By Anna Downes
342 pp. Minotaur/St. Martin’s. $28.When “No Safe Place” opens, Emily Proud-
man — who’s bailing out of her dreary Lon-
don life as a struggling actor and office temp
— is being driven to the French estate,
Querencia, where she’ll be working as a
“housekeeper slash au pair slash personal
assistant” for Scott and Nina Denny. One
minute the SUV is hurtling by green fields “punctuated
by yellow sunflowers and rust-red roofs,” and the next it
has turned onto a dank dirt track where “leaves brushed
the sides of the car like fingers and branches reached out
to one another overhead,” blotting out the sun.
The house, when they finally reach it, is welcoming —
bright and blooming and lovely. Nina seems kind, though
she does tell Emily, after installing her in a small, charm-
ing guest cottage, “I’d like to make the family house a
no-go zone.” How, then, will Emily be able to care for
6-year-old Aurelia, which was to be one of her duties?
“Yes, well, we can discuss all of that,” Nina says vaguely.
Nina does have work for Emily, but it doesn’t involve
Aurelia, who, it turns out, has a serious but unspecified
illness, as well as some behavioral issues. Before long it
begins to look like Querencia is not a healthy envi-
ronment for either Emily or Aurelia, but because the
situation worsens at an almost imperceptible tick, Emily
barely notices. Little things needle at her: Why does
Aurelia take so many pills? Why did Nina become so
angry at a group of hikers who got lost on the grounds of
the estate? Why isn’t there any internet or cellphone
reception? But probing too closely into any of those
things means Emily will have to take a hard look at some
of her own questionable life decisions, the ones that led
her to this job, which she took without any investigation.
So she just keeps rationalizing the things she hears and
sees.
As skilled as Downes is at ratcheting up the tension
and conveying Emily’s sense of thrumming unease, she
flounders in the last few chapters and flat-out struggles
with her denouement. After tearing through such an
unusual and thrilling narrative, and buying so com-
pletely into Emily’s gullibility and vulnerability, you want
“No Safe Place” to culminate in a revelatory fashion. It
doesn’t. You’ll see the end coming when you’re 50 pages
away.THE DAUGHTERS OF FOXCOTE MANOR
By Eve Chase
353 pp. Putnam. $27.“The forest looks like it’ll eat them alive,”
thinks Rita Murphy, the stolid, sensible
young nanny who’s driving her employer,
Jeannie Harrington, and the two Harrington
children to the family’s isolated Glouce-
stershire estate in the summer of 1971. “The
light’s gone a weird green and branches are
thrashing against the car’s windows.” Sound familiar?
Foxcote Manor, when it rears up in the gloom, looks
run-down, a far cry from the Harringtons’ elegant, wiste-
ria-draped mansion on London’s Primrose Hill. Here,
“ivy suckers up the timber and brick gabled facade,
dense, bristling, alive with dozens of tiny darting birds, a
billowing veil of bees.” After the housekeeper, a dead
ringer for Mrs. Danvers, emerges to them, she pulls Rita
aside to warn her about all the terrible things that might
befall her young charges: “Adders. Death cap mush-
rooms. Ticks.” Helpfully, before she leaves that first day,
she tells Rita to watch out for a local character named
“Fingers” Jonson: “Loner. Tall. Albino. Wanders the
woods. Our green man.”
So the stage has been set — a tad melodramatically, to
be sure — but to Chase’s credit, the story rebounds from
its too darkly drawn beginnings. Jeannie Harrington, it
becomes clear, is unwell, mired in a terrible depression
since the loss of a baby during childbirth. When Hera
Harrington, age 12, finds an infant in the forest, a “blan-
kety bundle” left on a tree stump, Jeannie is delighted.
For the first time, she seems like her old self. She also
refuses to let Rita call the police. “Do you wantthis little
thing to be carted off to some children’s home?” she asks
furiously. Rita feels “something intractable taking shape.
A wrongness.” She’s not mistaken: Before long, someone
will die at Foxcote Manor.
It’s at this point that another story, a present-day one,
begins to thread through the Gloucestershire chapters
with more vigor. Sylvie, 40, has just left her husband;
her bright 18-year-old daughter is in trouble and her
mother has been in an accident. How all these women
are connected is not immediately obvious. Chase parcels
out her clues slowly, without a hint of showiness. In the
end, “The Daughters of Foxcote Manor” is not really
about a murder, or a creepy house, but about families —
the ones we’re born into, the ones we make and espe-
cially the ones we flee.ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN GALLTINA JORDANis the deputy editor of the Book Review.
The Shortlist/Novels of Suspense and Isolation/By Tina Jordan
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