Thursday, July 02, 2020

Q&A with Riley Sager

From my Q&A with Riley Sager, author of Home Before Dark: A Novel:
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

This was a hard book to title, mostly because it’s really two books in one—the story of a woman returning to the allegedly haunted house she lived in as a child and the full text of the bestselling horror memoir her father wrote about their time there. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for a title, which is why I took a more abstract approach. I knew the title needed to signify a house was involved, but I also wanted it to hint at the paranormal. I considered several ideas, including House of Horrors, which I thought was a little too on the nose. That became the title of the book within the book. I finally settled on Home Before Dark because it has a kiss of the sinister while really conveying the sense of returning to a place you might not want to be...[read on]
Visit Riley Sager's website.



--Marshal Zeringue