Twenty-five years ago, the Holt family fled Baneberry Hall in the middle of the night and never returned. Maggie's father, Ewan, turned their brief stay into "House of Horrors," a wildly successful memoir about the malevolent presence that supposedly drove them out — a book that made the family famous and that Maggie, who was only five at the time, has never believed a word of.
Now an adult and a house-restorer by trade, Maggie inherits Baneberry Hall after her father's death and returns to renovate and sell it, determined to prove the "true story" was a fabrication. But as she works through the old Victorian's rooms, she begins to find that details from her father's book are eerily accurate — and that the townspeople, and perhaps the house itself, are hiding something about what really happened during those long-ago weeks.
Riley Sager builds the novel as a book-within-a-book, alternating Maggie's present-day investigation with chapters from her father's haunted-house memoir. The result is a twisty, atmospheric blend of ghost story and psychological mystery that keeps the reader guessing whether the danger at Baneberry Hall is supernatural, human, or something in between.