Home Before Dark

“Grief is tricky like that. It can lie low for hours, long enough for magical thinking to take hold. Then, when you’re good and vulnerable, it will leap out at you like a fun-house skeleton, and all the pain you thought was gone comes roaring back.”

Maggie contemplates the loss of her father. She keeps hoping that the fact that he deceived her will make her feel his loss less acutely. However, reminders of him are everywhere in her life. She worries that she’ll never be able to heal without knowing the truth about him. However, she also worries that the truth could alienate her further from his memory.

“Few things in life are more disappointing than knowing your parents aren’t being honest with you.”

Maggie spends most of her adult life being disappointed in her parents, particularly with what she believes is their deception about Baneberry Hall. However, even though she’s right about their deception, she’s wrong about their motivations. If she knew why Jessica and Ewan hid the truth from her, she wouldn’t feel as harshly toward them. They’re not evasive because they’re ashamed to tell her—but only because they’re protective of her.

“Every house has a story to tell.”

Maggie often says this to prospective buyers in her business. Each house tells the stories of the people who lived in it. The sum of their biographies is a house’s biography as well. In the case of a house like Baneberry Hall, the story is tragic. When Maggie contemplates authoring a possible sequel to her father’s book, this quote is the first line she writes, a sign that she’s now prepared to write her own story.

“It’s not safe there. Not for you.”

Among Ewan’s final words to Maggie is this warning. Maggie thinks that he means for her to stay away from Baneberry Hall to keep his secret. She’s right, but Ewan isn’t hiding the secret that she thinks he is. He doesn’t mean that she’ll be in physical danger, although it turns out that he’s wrong about that. Rather, he means that Maggie’s return could expose the truth about Petra’s death and alter Maggie’s future.

“Maybe I’m too superstitious, Mr. Holt […] But if I were you, I’d break a few more plates.”

Elsa Ditmer is a devout Christian, but she adheres to old European superstitions. She suggests that they break plates for good luck after Ewan see the first snake. However, Ewan’s admits that most of the book is false, it’s easy to see that this quote is merely an authorial signal to the audience that the narrative is taking a dark turn.

“I think it was a long con […] That your father—maybe your mother, too—was laying the groundwork for what was to come. And naive me was their patsy.”

Alcott responds to Maggie’s question about why Ewan would tell her the story he did the night of the police report. She’s right that Ewan was at the outset of a long deception, but it wasn’t for personal gain. Alcott wasn’t their patsy but another layer of protection to insulate Maggie against the repercussions of Petra’s death. Fortunately, Alcott will have another chance to do things differently at Baneberry Hall after the discovery of Petra’s bones.

“It dawned on me that her advice about believing Maggie in reality meant seeing things through my daughter’s eyes. To understand that, even though I knew these were the sounds of a house settling, they could seem quite menacing to someone so young.”

Ewan contemplates Elsa’s remark that Maggie is sensitive and that she sees things the rest of them might not. He hasn’t tried to experience the house as a five-year-old might. The gulf between the fears of children and those of adults is a conflict the adult Maggie struggles with. As in all of Ewan’s writing, in his final letter it’s difficult to gauge whether he was making a sincere point, or simply creating a cohesive narrative that would make him look insightful.

“At the time, I chalked up the gifts to post-divorce guilt. Now I think it was a form of atonement for making me live with the Book. Call me ungrateful, but I would have preferred the truth.”

Teenage Maggie didn’t enjoy the extravagant gifts that Ewan bought her with the money from the Book. She never believed they were an act of generosity but of penance for the life that her father and his book had imposed on her. Maggie prefers the truth, even when it’s unpleasant, which is reinforced when she learns the truth about the real reason for her parents’ deception.

“I do believe that things happen. Things we can’t explain away, no matter how much we try. The uncanny.”

At the cemetery, Dane and Maggie talk about the possible existence of ghosts. Dane is more open to the possibility of supernatural activity than Maggie, which makes some sense, given that he has spent more time at Baneberry Hall than she has. In addition, his quote is a tacit caution that Maggie might never learn the truth, no matter how hard she tries.

“Sometimes it’s best not knowing.”

In the book, Hibbs cautions Ewan about asking too many questions. Many of the novel’s characters have secrets that would damage themselves or their loved ones if shared. He raises the question of whether discovering the truth is always the best outcome, which itself raises questions about whether integrity can have a subjective nature.

“I’m saying Baneberry Hall remembers.”

According to Ewan’s book, Hibbs has an explanation for the accumulating, tragic stories that haunt Baneberry Hall. He believes in a sort of residual malevolence that imbues the materials of the house with a memory that makes it ever more susceptible to new evil. If Ewan can’t find a way to break the cycle and bring love into the house, Hibbs believes he’s in danger of adding to its morbid memories.

“Sometimes, Mags, a couple can go through something so terrible that not even love can fix it.”

At the Eiffel Tower, Ewan tells Maggie that he still loves Jessica and never plans on remarrying. Whatever else is true, however, Maggie believes that whatever happened at Baneberry Hall makes their marriage irreparable. At this point, she believes the damage is the result of Ewan’s lie and her mother’s ensuing exasperation and guilt. After reading his final letter, Maggie understands that protecting her destroyed her parents’ marriage.

“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.”

After Maggie wakes from her nightmare about Mister Shadow, the fear that follows her through the morning feels like a memory. However, most of the time she’s comfortable attributing her memories to her reading of Ewan’s book. He didn’t write the scene with Mister Shadow, which raises new, unsettling questions about what’s true. Either her memory is real, or her ability to distinguish real and false memories is compromised.

“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.”

After leaving Two Pines to return to the house, Ewan is stunned by how quickly their situation has changed. In only seven days, the ceiling collapsed, a snake infestation occurred, the record player began playing by itself, and Maggie saw imaginary beings. However, given that Ewan invented the book’s supernatural elements, the list of events reads more like a horror author’s plot checklist than an escalating group of terrors.

“I cry for all the versions of myself that have existed through the years. Confused five-year-old. Sullen child of divorce. Furious nine-year-old. Inquisitive me. Defiant me. Dutiful me. So many incarnations, each one seeking answers, leading me to right here, to right now, to a potential truth I have no idea how to handle.”

After booking a room at Two Pines, Maggie cries in the shower. Finding Petra’s body in the ceiling devastates her with grief, but it also distorts her already tenuous sense of identity. Among all of her other incarnations, she may be the daughter of a killer. She still wants to know the truth but realizes that she may have been better off never knowing.

“I sound like the me my father wrote about. I’ve become the Maggie from the Book.”

After Maggie finds Buster on the desk again, she tells Alcott that she’s no longer sure what to think about Baneberry Hall. This calls her identity into question yet again. She has come to the house to solve the mystery, so that she doesn’t have to be the Maggie from the book. She might actually be, or become, the version of Maggie that her father wrote about.

“I’ve been there […] Wanting to believe anything other than what’s right in front of you. For months. Even years.”

Marta tells Maggie that she still believes Curtis killed their daughter. She understands Maggie’s frantic desire to believe in her father’s innocence. However, she also understands the cost of believing what is improbable long past the point of justification. She believes that Maggie has enough evidence to know the truth but doesn’t want to see it yet. Of course, Marta has reasons for wanting Maggie to think this.

“Seven people had died in or near Baneberry Hall. All of them girls. All of them sixteen or younger. All of them in the presence of their fathers.”

Ewan recreates the timeline of deaths after visiting the library’s archives. He’s increasingly aware of the danger he could present to Maggie. However, he knows the narrative ramifications of his alleged discoveries at the library. His decision to include them is a calculated move to increase the tension of a work of fiction, not of a father worrying that he may become a danger to his daughter.

“It’s not the house I’m afraid of.”

After finding bruises on Maggie’s neck, Jessica prepares to leave the house with her daughter. She’s now more afraid of Ewan than Baneberry Hall. When contemplating the dissolution of their marriage after the book’s publication, it’s useful to imagine Jessica’s distaste for going along with stories about false bruises and her supposed fear of her husband.

“For us, Baneberry Hall is a house of horrors. One that none of us may dare enter again.”

These are Ewan’s concluding lines in House of Horrors. As Maggie learns, he quickly renders his statement false as he returns to the house every year. Until his final letter, he never again spoke to her on the subject, so the final line of the book was the only inadequate closure she had.

“I thought there was nothing you could do that would make me love you less. But I worried that knowing the details of what happened had the potential to change that thinking. And I didn’t want to see you as a monster, which is what everyone would have thought if word got out that you had killed Petra.”

Maggie spends much of the novel wrestling with her identity—the rightful identity that she believes the Book stole from her. Ironically, the Book made people treat her differently. She never knows that her image would have been far worse if the truth had been revealed. Ewan’s explanation finally helps her understand that it all may have worked out in her benefit, despite what it cost their family.

“We could have done better. We should have done better. Even though every time you asked for the truth was a reminder of the guilt all of us carried.”

Ewan’s final letter apologizes for his unwillingness to discuss the truth with Maggie, despite how it gnawed at her and hurt their relationship. He may have had regrets, but he never expressed regret for trying to give her a better future via his deception. He made no excuses for himself beyond his love for her and the frantic decision made in the aftermath of Petra’s death.

“The fact that my mother was willing to sacrifice herself like that told me I had been wrong about her. She wasn’t a monster. Neither was my father. They were just two people thrust into an unfathomable situation who were terrified about what might happen to their daughter. It doesn’t excuse what they did. But it sure does explain it.”

Maggie forgives her mother after learning the truth. Jessica gracefully accepts whatever sentencing the judge will give her. Maggie understands her parents now. Her parents may have made a mistake, but she knows their intentions were loving and selfless. Even though Ewan is dead, Maggie will have the chance to share her future with her mother, without either of them pretending about anything.