On writer formulas and Riley Sager, Part II
Ranking my favorites, then spoilers in the dividers!
Read Part I here
After my last Substack, I wasn’t sure if I should just jump right in to the Sager formula. I ultimately decided that might make this worthless for anyone who’s not interested in Sager’s work, or for those who do want to read more but don’t want to be completely spoiled. So first up, a quick personal ranking of Sager’s work to date!
Riley Sager Reads, Ranked:
Top Tier: Final Girls / The Last Time I Lied: I flip flop on which one is better all the time. Final Girls is his debut and the ending is top-notch, but I think I enjoyed the narrative, mystery, and reveal of The Last Time I Lied more
Mid Tier: The House Across the Lake; Lock Every Door; Home Before Dark: All of these are interesting mysteries with great settings and suspenseful sequences. I know some people are massive fans of Home Before Dark for taking on the haunted house/gothic mansion setting, but I preferred the cosmopolitan apartment complex and its mysterious residents in Lock Every Door. I also enjoyed the character arcs in The House Across the Lake and Lock Every Door.
Absolute Bottom Tier: Survive the Night: Unless you’re a diehard Sager fan, skip it.
Last warning: If you don’t want to read the formula, then skip the content between the dividers.
So to recap, here are some common threads among Sager’s books:
They’re not a series, so you can read them in any order. However, he’s started putting in little nods and Easter eggs to prior works for the fans, so if that’s something that matters, read them in publication order.
Each book is published in the summer, and they’re about 350-400 pages in length.
They fall in the mystery/thriller genre, often featuring common horror settings or characters like spooky summer camps, serial killer survivors, and abandoned Gothic mansions.
The main character is always a woman, often an unreliable narrator in some regard.
Major spoilers incoming: there is always a character pretending to be someone they’re not, and there’s a “red herring” character the audience is supposed to suspect for some reason.
Seriously, every single book has this dynamic. Sometimes the red herring character has something (less grand than, you know, murder) to hide, or other times they’re just a misunderstood figure.
In The House Across the Lake, I was expecting “wife gone missing” Katherine to end up with the husband being the red herring (because it’s always the husband, right?) — even though he was also property scouting at other lakes where women have gone missing. My money was on the handsome ex-cop-turned-contractor next door. My wild card pick was the famous novelist neighbor, but he was barely mentioned and it would have been out of left field to suddenly give him center stage with zero breadcrumbs.
Instead, it turns out the husband did it. Just not the missing woman's husband — the narrator’s.
It’s definitely not the twist for everyone, but The House Across the Lake was a great case study for me. Sager lays the foundation early. The lake has its own ambiance and lore, to the point that it crosses into that setting-as-a-character territory. With dramatic moments like an early drowning rescue and chilling campfire tales about a lake that traps the souls of the deceased, the supernatural is woven into the narrative in a subtle way. The narrator — and thus the reader — don’t suspect this possibility until the novel reveals it.
I personally loved this. To me, a great mystery is one where the answer makes absolute sense when revealed, but isn’t obvious during the investigation. In this case, knowing Sager’s standard mystery formula actually enhanced the reveal, because the character pretending to be someone they aren’t is Katherine. In her first scene in the book, she drowns in the lake. When Casey resuscitates her, it’s not Katherine she’s brought back, but her deceased husband — the man Casey killed after discovering he was abducting and murdering women around the area.
(Aside: the contractor ended up being the red herring character, given his past with a wife who committed suicide and his covering up the suicide to put suspicion on himself instead. It’s actually a wonderful bit of character work that ends up enhancing the plot later, and reinforced the novel’s approach to mental health being something our communities can either help or hinder. Other readers will say that last one is a stretch and I’m reading into it too much 🤷🏻♀️)
Katherine’s odd behavior makes a lot more sense in this context, and I may actually reread or give this an audiobook listen to pick up on all the clues. I was impressed with how Sager framed this novel. It feels like there was a whole prequel series that could have been written given all the backstory we got for the setting and all the major players in the mystery. It’s a welcome return to form for Sager, and a reminder to me as a writer that some of the best expectations we can subvert are within our power to do so.
And with that, my focus on Riley Sager subsides until next summer. Fall is starting to creep in here in Ohio, so maybe some more spooky Substacks will be headed your way in the coming months.
Until next time, fellow word nerds.
— Justice