Blog tour: Home Before Dark by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir, translated by Victoria Cribb

This post is part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Blog Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.

‘November, 1967, Iceland. Fourteen-year-old Marsí has a secret penpal – a boy who lives on the other side of the country – but she has been writing to him in her older sister’s name. Now she is excited to meet him for the first time.

‘But when the date arrives, Marsí is prevented from going, and during the night her sister Stína goes missing – her bloodstained anorak later found at the place where Marsí and her penpal had agreed to meet.

‘November, 1977. Stína’s disappearance remains unsolved. Then an unexpected letter arrives for Marsí. It’s from her penpal, and he’s still out there…

‘Desperate for news of her missing sister, but terrified that her penpal might coming after her next, Marsí returns to her hometown and embarks on an investigation of her own.

‘But Marsí has always had trouble distinguishing her vivid dreams from reality, and as insomnia threatens her sanity, it seems she can’t even trust her own memories.

‘And her sister’s killer is still on the loose…’

In Home Before Dark, by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir, we follow 24-year-old Marsí from her flat in Reykjavik to her family home just outside the small town of Hvítársíða, around the tenth anniversary of her older sister Stína’s unsolved disappearance.

Marsí has spent the past decade silently struggling with guilt, as she was supposed to meet Bergur, a long-distance penpal she’d been writing to using Stína’s name, on the evening Stína went missing, and she suspects he might been involved. When Bergur re-establishes contact out of the blue, Marsí becomes determined to conduct her own investigation.

Back in Hvítársíða, Marsí sifts through Stína’s possessions and talks to people who knew her sister, despite her parents’ pleas for her to accept that Stína is gone and they may never know what happened to her. All kinds of leads come to light, and when a young woman staying nearby is found dead, Marsí starts to seriously consider the possibility that the explanation for Stína’s disappearance lies closer to home.

Home Before Dark is both a riveting whodunnit and a masterclass in the modern Gothic. A remote setting in winter! A sinister old house that seems to have a mind of its own! Dark secrets from the past just waiting for their moment to surface! A mother and daughter whose mental imbalances manifest in disturbing ways! A family whose unlucky stars align so comprehensively and juicily, you don’t suspend your disbelief so much as offer it up to the author as tribute! Needless to say, I loved it.

Right from the start, I found myself collecting theories about what happened to Stína – as the sisters’ childhood friend Gústi points out, Marsí’s idea that her penpal was behind Stína’s disappearance wasn’t the most likely explanation.

Through Marsí’s narrative in 1977 and Stína’s narrative in 1967, we meet a whole cast of people who might have had ill intentions towards Stína, such as her heartbroken ex-boyfriend; a classmate she had played an indirect part in humiliating; the teacher of her evening art course; and her own father. Even if Bergur isn’t in the frame, his reappearance, and Marsí’s difficulty tracing him, suggest he’s not totally irrelevant.

I really enjoyed piecing things together alongside or just ahead of Marsí, and I didn’t see the string of gasp-inducing revelations and events at the end of the book coming at all!

While she made some bad decisions over the course of the book, I warmed to Marsí as a character, identifying with her experience as an uncharismatic, discontented teenager craving connection, and sympathising with her compulsion to dig deeper into the events of 1967 and frustration when obstructed or discouraged from doing so.

Stína’s narrative, as well as giving us first-hand access to scenes Marsí wasn’t there to witness, balances out other characters’ frozen-in-time impressions of her as all good or all bad, humanising her as someone generally well-intentioned and unmalicious, but sometimes rather self-absorbed and impressionable – a typical teenager, in other words.

There were a couple of elements of the story that particularly sent shivers down my spine. One is old buildings with dark histories. The author describes Marsí’s family home in fantastic detail, not only in terms of its imposing appearance and discomforting aura, but its lore: the sisters’ paternal grandfather shot himself in the cellar before their time, making that part of the house a focal point of fear and awe for them.

Then there’s the Old Doctor’s House, which in its latest incarnation is a school teaching block where Stína attended her evening art classes, but in 1943 was used as a workhouse for teenage girls who’d been caught fraternising with occupying British and American soldiers. Stína’s teacher gives her a box of keepsakes he claims to have found there, tasking her with tracking down its owner.

That brings us to the other haunting element – photographs – as the box contains a photo with some pertinent writing on the back. What’s more, ten years on, Marsí discovers a mysterious photo tucked behind one of Stína in a family album. She also develops an unfinished film of Stína’s, which includes a photo of a boy she can’t identify because his head is out of shot, who may or may not be relevant to her investigation.

Home Before Dark is addictive, twisty, and irresistably dark and haunting.