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For context, the character Matt Kellner had been abducted by a serial killer. Matt Kellner did not know he had been targeted for abduction.

"What kept weighing me down with fright was that I knew that something had been happening to Matt that caused him to disappear—I believed there were forces beyond Matt’s control that led to his disappearance and had been circling him weeks before he was “officially” missing. There was no other angle from which I could look at what happened to Matt Kellner: he had been targeted, and these forces entered into his life and before it became too late to figure any of this out they had simply taken him."

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    The word before seems out of place: "Forces entered into his life and it became too late ..."
    – Yosef Baskin
    Commented Feb 15 at 5:51
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    “before it became too late“ I see nothing weird or out of place in the quotation.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Feb 15 at 6:20
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    I think the author means “before there was time”. So it’s grammatical but not logical. Writing intended to be fast-moving but isn’t really good.
    – Xanne
    Commented Feb 15 at 8:14
  • Once he had been abducted, it was too late for him to work out that he was at risk of abduction.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Feb 15 at 9:24
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    OK - with the additional context, it was too late for the narrator to work it out.,
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Feb 15 at 11:41

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The speaker is saying that they had simply taken him before it became too late (for me) to figure out what was going on. That is, while I still had time to figure it out.

Is the speaker "beating himself up" about his failure to figure it all out?

It is an illogical thought process, since by the time he was abucted it was indeed "too late" -- if the measure of timeliness was figuring it out and preventing it.

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