Keeping Up With The Lutzes: Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

I love Riley Sager.  Dude knows how to twist an ending and let me tell you, I am hard to surprise but he can pull it off.  I'd been waiting for months on his newest novel and hoovered it up in about 12 hours. God bless the Brooklyn Public Library.  If you want to get a look at his previous stuff, I'm including a handy link over here.  Please note I'm switching to Goodreads pages for links now.  They have links to various other sites where you can check out or buy the book.

Home Before Dark is a mixed bag of mystery, a big old Gothic house with a history of deaths and disappearances, and sort of an homage to Amityville.  If you're the type that yawns and says "but haunted houses and murder mysteries have been done to *death*", then I suggest you either give up now or accept that you haven't read Riley Sager's version and come enjoy the ambiance.  I love a good old-school ghost story, myself.  No buckets of gore or people picking which body part has to be stapled to a ceiling fan or somesuch.

Our heroine is one Maggie Holt, an interior designer who flips houses and who, by the way, fled her home in the middle of the night when she was five because her family was attacked by vicious ghosts.  At least, that's what her dad's "I didn't make this #@*& up, I promise" tell-all book says, anyway.  This infamous book has followed Maggie her whole life, though she can't remember anything from the few short weeks her family spent in Baneberry Manor.

What do you do when your parents try to one-up the Lutzes? Call them on their b.s., that's what.  But all of Maggie's questions about her missing days and the supernatural smorgasbord of a novel go unanswered.  Her parents divorced after the book came out.  People followed her around, asking if she really saw ghosts, can she talk to ghosts, can she maybe get a message to Uncle Rick about their missing cat, ad nauseum.

Then her dad dies and Maggie gets a very disturbing inheritance:  the home they abandoned all those years ago is still owned by her father.  And he's been going back, every year on the anniversary of their "escape."  Ignoring his final words of warning, she heads back to the house to start making it ready to sell.  But the town is still pissed about the stain their father left on its reputation, her neighbors don't believe she's quite as amnesiac as she says and suddenly the strange events from her father's book are weaving into memories.  The record player turning itself on upstairs.  Servants' bells in the kitchen ringing on their own. And the creepiest thing - her armoire opening to eject ghosts, including Mister Shadow (I pictured a shorter Babadook), a ghost girl (presumably the former owner's daughter who died under mysterious circumstances) and most disturbingly, a dead woman whose eyes are nailed shut with coins placed over them.

Basically, stand this upright, make it mobile and tuck it into that pile of stuffed animals.

The voices alternate between chapters of her father's book and Maggie's present experiences as she tries to reconcile the terrifyingly real crap happening now with the book she's completely dismissed as a hoax for her whole life. Why was her father hanging onto a house he was adamant his own family should never live in again?  Are her night terrors actually memories that she'd been repressing? And what kind of ghost is this attached to a damn record of "Sixteen, Going On Seventeen"? (Really, I'd have expected Springsteen at the least.) 
Every time I thought I'd made up my mind that the answer to everything was right there, it turned up about six feet to the left and three miles away.  I was constantly on edge reading her dad's chapters, even though I didn't know if he was just trying to make bank or if there really was some kind of DeFeo house level of crazy going on.  The ending completely threw me, but it was nicely tied up (always appreciate that) and I can say this was the most interesting haunted house I've read about in a very long time.  Climb in and see if you can figure out who's telling the truth - just make sure that closet's closed over there, would you?

2019's In-Lieu List

Hello, readers.   I could give a lot of reasons I haven't updated in a long time - some of them are reasons we all share for not being particularly motivated right now - but I'm going to get right to it.


I read some very good stuff last year that I need to pass on, so in (temporary) lieu of full reviews, I wanted to share a list of my top reads from 2019.  Each one has a handy link to its Goodreads page instead of Amazon, since I don't presume everybody wants or has the means to make purchases right now.  I love Goodreads and I often use my to-read list to look for books I can borrow from various libraries.  Here's the list - I've noted a few things, such as format and audience if it's not adult fiction.  Please comment if you have something (spoiler-free) to add about any of the books or would like to recommend to me and the other viewers.  Here's hoping for a more productive season - stay safe and keep reading.

1. Doctor Who: Nothing O'Clock (Doctor Who 50th Anniversary E-Shorts #11)    Neil Gaiman
2. Harrow County Volume 1: Countless Haints    Cullen Bunn *graphic novel*
3. Recursion    Blake Crouch
4. The Last Time I Lied    Riley Sager
5. Hangman    Jack Heath
6. Just One Bite   Jack Heath *sequel to Hangman*
7. Jacaranda (The Clockwork Century, #6)    Cherie Priest  *short, ok to read alone if you haven't read the series*
8. This Body's Not Big Enough for Both of Us    Edgar Cantero
9. The Cape    Jason Ciaramella  *graphic novel*
10. The Guild Volume 1    Felicia Day  *graphic novel*
11. Elevation    Stephen King  *short*
12. Yesterday    Felicia Yap
13. Nyctophobia    Christopher Fowler
14. Ghosts of Gotham    Craig Schaefer
15. Cold Spectrum (Harmony Black, #4)    Craig Schaefer
16. Glass Predator (Harmony Black, #3)    Craig Schaefer
17. Red Knight Falling (Harmony Black, #2)    Craig Schaefer
18. Harmony Black (Harmony Black, #1)    Craig Schaefer
19. Cari Mora    Thomas  Harris
20. The Accident Season    Moira Fowley-Doyle  *YA lit*
21. Small Spaces (Small Spaces, #1)    Katherine Arden  *kids lit*
22. Invasive    Chuck Wendig
23. Zeroes    Chuck Wendig
24. Someone Like Me    M.R. Carey
25. Jane Steele    Lyndsay Faye
26. Truly Devious (Truly Devious, #1)    Maureen Johnson
27. Alice Isn't Dead    Joseph Fink
28. The Suicide Motor Club    Christopher Buehlman

The Last Thing I Told You by Emily Arsenault

Full disclosure:  I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a review.  What I wish I'd also received was a better pay-off for a story with a lot of promise.  Generally, I like novels about therapists and psychologists. The variety of patient stories, the struggle for their own stability, and the chance of great surprise when it turns out they are much scarier than anything you’d hear in their sessions.  Not everybody can be Hannibal, but there’s always that chance that the plaid suit and the kitchen utensils will come out by the tenth session. I got hooked into this particular story with the promise of a mystery and an unraveling patient-doctor relationship.

The book opens in the office of Mark Fabian, therapist for years and corpse for hours.  His head is bashed in, his patient notes are sketchy, and oh, by the way, his closest friends report him as having memory problems recently, so good luck with those notes again. The chapters alternate between narrators Henry, a local cop who gained fame from a retirement home shooting a few years previously, and Nadine, a former patient of Fabian’s.  I’m still getting my head around a shooter in a frigging *retirement home.* Not that it’s too farfetched these days, but what the what?

Betty White would have taken his punk ass out in a second.

Nadine’s story alternates between the present and 1997, when she was in therapy after a violent incident at school – with all this backstory, you expect her underlying psychosis to be something shocking.  She even writes that perversion is in her blood (cue dramatic music).  I don’t know if the author planned something bigger to explain the build-up to the outburst and then gave up or we’re actually supposed to be shocked by something that turns out to be terribly garden-variety.

Henry’s side of things covers his involvement in the shooting (he took down a shooter and is now a local hero who just wants people to stop calling him that) and his attempt to piece together how Fabian (I kept reading that as ‘Fabio’) wound up dead.  Oh, and his kids are getting warped by fairytales with iron shoes and decapitations.  I don’t know if that’s supposed to be a cautionary bit about your kids winding up in therapy or a suggestion for scary stuff hidden in children’s fiction. Either way, now I want to read ‘The Red Shoes.’

Honestly, this book felt like such a tangled mess that I can barely write this review.  It started out so readable and then just seemed to drag into wet noodles. Other crimes in the area are mentioned, but written in an almost throw-away fashion, even though they are suddenly a big deal for the ending.  There’s no startling reveal of some long-buried secret to explain Nadine’s violence.  There’s no startling reveal that Henry is someone interesting.  Fabian’s murder has one of the most beige explanations I’ve ever read.

"Yes, I know, but I'm trying to look Scottish or something."

If a book starts out crap and then ends the same way, that’s bad. This whole bait-and-switch thing seems even worse, because now you’ve had a chance to get excited over where things are going. Surely this will not end in you slapping yourself awake at nine p.m. and throwing the book into the library donation bag.  Just because I was almost asleep doesn’t mean I take the whole bait-and-switch thing lying down. I won’t be looking for anything else by this author.  Now if someone will introduce me to a nice novel involving a suit and fork…

The Witches of Eastwick or How I Learned to Hate John Updike

Movies tend to screw up books.  It happens so often you can say "oh, I saw the movie" to anyone recommending a book and they will automatically go into zombie-groan-eyeball-rolling despair.  However, I saw the movie version of The Witches of Eastwick years ago (it was released back in '87) and it grew into a thing of beauty compared to the tripe from which it sprang.  It still had some scenes that made me turn green and the casting made no sense - with the exception of Jack Nicholson - but the story was far less of a clusterfoque.  *I would like to clarify that this book and movie are in no way connected to the book and tv show The Witches of East End.*


In the book, we meet three witches living in a small town and screwing everybody.  No kidding, those are the two things you are told straight off and then repeatedly about these women.  It was the late 60s and that whole sexual freedom thing was rampant. One of them even boffed the other one's husband but nobody cared. We're also told one of the husbands was transformed into a table mat, another is hanging like dried flowers in a basement and the third turned to powder and is shelved in an urn.  Somehow the women are also involved with this Unitarian church, one of them is nailing the pastor and all of them became extremely powerful sorceresses upon moving to the town, though that's never really explained.  Makes me want to stay the hell out of Rhode Island, because who wants a third nipple? Wait, did I tell you all three women had an extra nipple? yeah, there's that.

Enter a scruffy sleazeball who sets up an unseen lab in a crumbling mansion and installs a teak wood spa room with a retractable roof where he can have orgies and share his greasy loins with women who are inexplicably drawn to him.  All three witches go from scorn to hot-tubbing in a blink.  At one point, one of the witches actually kisses his ass.  There's a visual.

To sum up, we've got some longstanding criterion for your average American witch:  the presence of a third nipple (aka a "witch's teat"), inversion of religious phrases to perform pagan rituals and blind devotion to a devil character to whom she shows allegiance by kissing his backside.  We've got what I'd call serious misogyny with a dash of "look how well I know witchy shit" e.g,  "I made it rain so I could walk my dog on the beach! Watch out for piles!"  What we don't have are characters that make you care about how they turn out, explanations for their sudden mastery of the craft and roles for any strong women who aren't just relying on smooching devil tupkes.  If you think Mad Men just wasn't tough enough on those crybaby girls who shouldn't be in an office anyway, this book might be for you.  For the rest of us, there are plenty of others that won't give you the urge to vacuum in high heels...for example, Alice Hoffman's The Probable Future, those East End chicks I mentioned, Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, or Erik Setiawan's Of Bees and Mist.

Last Words

"Don't embarrass me with this shit."

Investigator Mark Novak can't get those words out of his head; two years ago they were the last words he spoke to his wife before she was murdered.  It also happens to be exactly what I was thinking when I started this book.  I like Koryta but he's been hit ( So Cold the River ) or miss (Those Who Wish Me Dead) in the past.

Mark works for a pro bono company that frees wrongfully convicted criminals.  They get a letter from a small-town pariah named Ridley Barnes who isn't even in prison but for years has been under suspicion for murder.  When a girl went missing in the local caves, Ridley was the experienced (if mostly batshit, no pun intended) cave expert who brought her out.  Bad news was, she was dead and his time in the cave was riddled with memory holes and strange exclamations about the mystical qualities of the cave.  Didn't help he referred to the cave as a "she."  Anyway, the town decides he's guilty despite lack of evidence and Ridley decides he has to find out for himself if he is guilty.  Enter Novak, who has been careening around looking for whoever killed his wife.

Ridley's hometown of Garrison, IL has all the stereotypical small-town characters you'd expect and sadly, none of the surprises.  Again and again, Mark runs into people who won't talk, truth that's skirted like an antebellum housewife and characters that lack so much fleshing-out they may as well be on a forensics table.

I admit caves scare me silly, so if I'm going to spend even imaginary-time in one, there had better be a pay-off.  I waited and hoped that there would be something supernatural or at least surprising as the mystery unfolded, but only got a goose egg and a reveal that was lacking in both imagination and impact.  If you're interested in caving - or even not - and want an interesting story of what goes on down there,  let me recommend Jeff Long's The Descent (not the same story as the movie, trust me) or Cherie Priest's Those Who Went Remain There Still.