DEADLINE
Sony & 21 Laps Win Riley Sager Thriller Novel ‘Home Before Dark’
EXCLUSIVE: Sony Pictures won a competitive auction for Home Before Dark, a thriller novel by bestselling author Riley Sager, with Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps attached to produce. Book will be published June 30 by Dutton.
A woman returns to the house made famous by her father’s bestselling horror memoir and the issue becomes, is it really haunted as her father claimed? Some 25 years earlier, the young woman moved with her parents into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. They spent three weeks there before fleeing in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a nonfiction book called House of Horrors that described ghostly encounters with spirits that rivaled The Amityville Horror in popularity—and skepticism.
The woman restores old homes and was too young to remember what her father described in a book that made him rich. She inherits the property and counts herself a skeptic when she returns to renovate the home. She is confronted from many who belong to the home’s past. To the point she begins to think maybe he wasn’t making it up.
Maia Eyre is shepherding for Sony, Emily Morris for 21 Laps. Deal was done by Hotchkiss Daily & Associates on behalf of Michelle Brower at Aevitas Creative Management.