A Riley Sager Postmortem: When Quantity Misses Quality
- Rianne Aryn
- Sep 11
- 13 min read
Have you ever gone to a new restaurant ordered a couple of things off the menu and went, “Oh my god. This is amazing! I have to come back here sometime and get more stuff, I can only imagine how great the rest of the menu is,” and then gone back to order some other menu items with a friend just to find out the restaurant only has about 3 serviceable dishes and the rest of them are unpalatable? Well, regardless of if that’s happened to you or not, how you would feel in that scenario is about how I feel about Riley Sager novels.
The Beginning
My first foray into his work was Lock Every Door, which despite its few issues I thoroughly enjoyed. I won’t rehash every reason why here (if you want to know my deeper thoughts I do have a full-length review here) but in short, I thought it was a rather poignant and terrifying look into how the rich exploit the poor and how easy it is to fall into desperate circumstances that you feel you cannot leave in fear of losing your livelihood. The set up was really well done and it assuaged that overwhelming “why don’t you just leave?!” feeling you often get in thriller stories in a way I personally hadn’t seen before. That, the themes, plus the tailored tension and pacing made me fall in love with what Riley Sager could do as an author. So, as any rational reader does, I picked up some more of his books the next time I was in search of a new read... and wow was that a bad decision.
I read a total of five extra books after Lock Every Door, with Survive the Night being the nail in the coffin to my discontinued interest in Sager. And so, since I read these books and love to complain, here’s a rundown of what I thought of each of them and what about each of them made me give up:
The second Sager book I read was The Only One Left, which follows Kit, a caregiver/home aide, who is accused of killing her mother and therefore can only get a job with a client no willing caregiver would take: Lenora Hope — the woman who killed her entire family. As soon as Kit gets to the estate, Kit can tell there’s something off about Lenora, and when Lenora offers to tell her the truth about that cursed night, Kit can’t refuse.
I picked this one up around Thanksgiving and immediately felt less of a pull to the material than Lock Every Door. The only reason I can think of is the tension. Lock Every Door seems to have this mounting horror to it in the form of questions unanswered. Why is Jules more afraid of the apartment building than the fact that she got run over by a car? Why does she get immediately accepted into an apartment sitting job despite her fessing up to desperate circumstances? Why is she not allowed to speak to the apartment owners in the building? Why has an apartment sitter abruptly left without a trace with no warning, and why are people treating it like its normal? All of these questions are posed within the first five or so chapters. Here, the only two questions are “what happened to Lenora Hope’s family” and “did Kit kill her mother”, both of which feel promptly abandoned to introduce the reader to a laundry list of characters. We don't really even get back to these questions for half the book because a lot of it is set up.
Just out of sheer boredom I put this book down for a good week or so until I had nothing to do in the downtime of cooking Thanksgiving dinner. And I want you to know, dear writer, that I was so gripped by Lock Every Door I dropped everything to read it into the wee hours of the night because I was THAT invested. THAT was how much I needed to know what happened. When I did pick The Only One Left back up, I was much more inclined to take breaks and spread out the read. I just wasn't nearly as invested as I was with my previous read.
The ending of this one was the real hint that maybe Sager just wasn’t for me. I felt that Lock Every Door had an errant twist or red herring, but The Only One Left takes it to an extreme. Even almost a year later I still don’t fully understand the ending. The reveal of the “killer” comes out of left field, I’m still not sure who Lenora really is or what else she’s lied about, and I still have no idea what role Kit needed to play in any of the story’s events. Overall, it was a 2 at best, but the strength of Lock Every Door had me thinking maybe it was a fluke. I was wrong....
After putting the next intriguing title on hold at the library I eventually got it at the top of the next year. Yeah, I waited a couple of weeks for this next one, which makes it all the more disappointing. Final Girls is exactly what it sounds like, a novel about final girls — the last woman standing at the end of a slasher/horror movie. Quincy survived an ill-fated camping trip with college friends and became a part of a trio of women who experienced similar run ins with their own serial killers/mass murderers. Qunicy wants to forget her ordeal and put it behind her, so much so she develops a mental block when remembering that night. But when one of the women in the final girls trio dies, the other, Sam, bulldozes into Quincy’s life and forces her to confront the horrors of her final girl experience.
This one went off the rails pretty quickly, Sam keeps making comments and pushing Quincy to do edgier things than she would normally do — including late night vigilanteeism in the local park which ends in Quincy putting a homeless man into a coma. After which Sam and Quincy enter into this weird power struggle in their relationship that culminates in a fight for the officer who saved Quincy during her final girl night’s affections. It really felt like the narrative was meandering with no real point to it and I felt like that suspicion was confirmed when the triple twist happened. Yup, it was becoming a pattern at this point. And yes, dear writer, the twists — once again — did not make sense. Sam’s identity, the “real killer” that night on Quincy’s camping trip, the fate of the other final girl, all of it was incredibly poorly done. It left a lot to be desired and my reaction to this day is still, “Huh? Why?” — because none of the character motivations made ANY sense.
I felt like this was a symptom of Sager having a half-baked story idea. Maybe he really fell in love with the concept of a trio of final girls and couldn't let it go? Whatever it was, it felt like there wasn’t actually a story there, hence the meandering and the poorly thought-out ending. All that to say it was a 2.5 on my scale. Final Girls at least was written better than The Only One Left in terms of pacing and tension, so I once again opted to give Sager the benefit of the doubt and trudged on to the next read....
The Last Time I Lied was a blip on my radar to be honest. The blurb seemed promising so I went for it, and at first it seemed like it could beat the emerging streak. It had a strong start with the missing girls, The main character, Emma, had her standout quirks, but the inciting incident happens and... nothing. Crickets. I’m bored. I just found myself not caring about the characters or what happened to the missing girls. I wasn’t sure exactly what the sin was with this one, I thought maybe it was bit too slow paced for my tastes, but something about didn’t strike a chord so rather than trying to force it I DNF’d it.
Because I felt like it was on me for not enjoying it, given my early abandonment of the narrative, I thought maybe it wasn't Sager at all and instead I just wasn’t in the mood for thrillers. Now I realize it was just that the hook for the narrative was too weak to carry my interest through to the later chapters where presumably things would pick up. But without that revelation I decided to pivot to romance and other storytelling mediums and didn’t pick up another Sager until July.
I was once again in the mood for a thriller and I had just begun creating a TBR list when The House Across The Lake made it onto my radar. Once again, thinking of how thoroughly I enjoyed Lock Every Door, I picked it up and made my fourth mistake. Casey is a washed-up alcoholic actress mourning the death of her husband who becomes fascinated with the couple living across from her lake house. One night, her neighbor and budding friend, Katherine, screams and disappears and Casey decides she’ll do whatever it takes to figure out what happened. Promising premise. I love a good mystery. Nope! The ending is nonsensical. Sager also switches between timeline-based perspectives, which is my preferred dual perspective medium, but when thinking back on the details in the “now” perspectives before the reveal of the twist, it becomes clear that Sager writes in details to throw you off that don't make sense on a reread — which is terrible form for a mystery/thriller.
Now this one I have a review of in my July Reads breakdown which you can read here but it’s worth another mention, because as you can probably tell by my thought process up until now, I still thought Sager’s streak of poor writing was a series of flukes and personal reading preferences. Even for this book I blamed my dislike of it on the sudden supernatural twist forced into the story in the third quarter. I’m not one for supernatural horror and thriller since I find the things that can happen in real life infinitely more terrifying, so not liking a supernatural thriller wasn’t a surprise to me. The way it was executed wasn’t very well done even putting aside my dislike for the subgenre (since there’s really only one clue to anything supernatural being afoot in the narrative before the reveal and its mention is so inconsequential it feels less like Chekov's gun and more like filler) but I still ignored that fact in the name of impartiality. So, I gave it 3 stars and kept on pushing.
I decided I wouldn’t count Sager out just yet, even though I now had ample reason to based on my own personal enjoyment of his storytelling dropping off a steep cliff. No, once again the weird character writing, now formulaic triple twist, and wildly inconsistent pacing and tension from book to book were just flukes! All in my head! Surely the kind of author who could write Lock Every Door is a good writer. No one can just write that well on accident, right?
Sigh this is where it all came crashing down for me. What is there to even say at this point? I saw a Youtube video of a booktuber I occasionally watch reviewing the book in all its pathetic glory recommended in my feed and I decided, “Hey, let me read this book and come to my own conclusions before watching”. So I did, and this book was infuriating!
The main character, Charlie, who has some sort of unspecified psychosis is taking a rideshare home from college and her driving companion is more than a little creepy and odd. She knows he’s lying to her and becomes increasingly weary that he’s actually the serial killer who’s been on the prowl at her college campus, but she does virtually nothing with this information! Every chance to escape she passes up or ruins, every time something scary happens she decides it was a delusion, every time she has to hide she becomes comically visible!
There’s no point where she ever makes a real, competent decision she follows through on. None!
And then the Sager triple twist is employed and my brain breaks. Not in the “oh my god this was a mind-blowing twist but it totally makes sense with the clues given to us and now I’m obsessed” way, but the “what in the actual hell is this? This is so stupid my brain is malfunctioning like a waterlogged computer” way. Not a good feeling to get from a book. Most of my enjoyment from reading this book came from ranting and complaining about it to anyone who would listen as I read it. Literally. There were several times I stopped reading it to call and talk to someone so I could complain about the limited mental capacity of the main character and/or the plot.
This, however, still was not enough to convince me of the lackluster quality of Sager novels. What fully convinced me was the aforementioned Youtube video. This booktuber put all my feelings into words, and while there were some things I did heavily disagree with, hearing someone else also have the same issues as I did with his narratives really knocked me out of my stupor. Sometimes you see the potential of something and not the actual quality of it. Because I saw the quality of Lock Every Door, I saw the potential of every other book I read from him, never stopping to really ask myself if potential was enough to sustain a story. In short, it’s not.
So Where Does Sager Go Wrong?
So writers, what exactly is Riley Sager doing wrong? Why have I come to the decision to no longer read his work? There are several little things that I mentioned throughout my discussion of the books I’ve read from him that really add up to two mounting problems: predictability and inconsistency.
Predictability
The biggest example of this is what I call the “triple twist” which hasn’t failed to show up in any of the novels I’ve read from Sager. You think the narrative is going one way that makes sense and adds up, only for a wrench to be thrown in and take you down a completely different course...only to find out that course is a fakeout so you’re left floundering and knocked on your butt by ANOTHER twist. Sometimes the twists that happened came so fast you didn’t really have time to think if they made sense or not — which I assume is by design because all of the lackluster novels I’ve listed (save for The Last Time I Lied by virtue of DNF’ing it) have details that don’t add up upon the reveal of the twists. I often found myself wishing Sager would just play things straight because the concepts of the novels themselves were strong without unnecessary messy twists. In other words, he does too much, and doing too much has become a hallmark of his writing.
The reason Lock Every Door worked is because the twists were toned down. The reveal of the real intentions of those at the Bartholomew feels a little underwhelming but fits better with the overall theme of the book than the previously proposed theory from the characters, and because it works well with the theme the subsequent twist about Jules’ fate feels warranted. But the other novels don’t take this route, which leaves me yearning for what could have been.
This is where we’ll actually begin to get into spoilers, so if you want to check out any of these books for yourself, you might want to read them and come back. For Survive The Night it would have played better if Josh really was the campus killer locked in a match of wits with Charlie. For House Across The Lake it would have been better if Casey really did kidnap Katherine’s husband, Tom, and was torturing him to try to get him to confess. Final Girls would have been better if Sam really was a final girl trying to get Quincy to accept and process her trauma in semi villainous ways that almost got her killed. The Only One Left would be better if Lenora was who she said she was and orchestrated the murders of her family with or without help. All of these ideas are strong on their own, but instead Sager muddles them with complicated uninteresting twists, only made more uninteresting by the fact that I could almost always see them coming because I had read enough of his work.
Also, what’s with boyfriends, husbands, and love interests always being the killer? I haven’t finished The Last Time I Lied, but if I had to guess, whoever’s responsible for the disappearance of Emma’s friend is definitely someone she was either dating back then or tried to start dating in the present, and there'd be an 80% chance that I'm right.
Inconsistency
The fact that Sager’s endings are all so predictably off the rails and terrible makes the fact that he’s also inconsistent really confusing. In Lock Every Door the writing is really streamlined. I can’t remember a single detail given or written that didn’t factor into the larger story at work. Everything had a place in the narrative, and that kind of tight writing is what really pulls me in as a reader. Comparing it to Survive the Night and Final Girls? I can’t figure out what happened. Charlie’s narrative feels so long, filled with details that literally don’t matter given the final twist of the narrative. Every action is drawn out in a way that listens better than it reads. Not to mention Charlie’s change in characterization from a woman willing to tease and fight her captor to a woman who can’t decide what’s real and cowers with no follow through.
Qunicy has much of the same issues. She’s this woman afraid of messing up even slightly who then decides to throw caution to the wind and beat up an old homeless man and cheat on her husband? Even with someone egging her on why would this take place? Much of the plot is just Quincy spending time with Sam doing things that really don’t seem to matter in the bigger narrative. Half of the book feels irrelevant. Because of this, both Final Girls and Survive the Night struggle with pacing, character motivation, and tension. This problem is also seen in The House Across The Lake with Casey’s random side quest into investigating the missing girls in the area that she already knew what happened to, and in The Only One Left with the mystery of the last caregiver, the fate of Kit’s mom and the budding romance with the groundskeeper.
Things pick up as quickly as they fall off, subplots that never impact the main story get expounded on, characters are either so bland it’s possible for them to take any course of action or they have one defining trait they immediately abandon when it suits the narrative. It becomes hard to track what’s important, which makes the whole story less enjoyable.
Final Thoughts
Overall, when the building blocks of storytelling are poorly thought out and arranged, your writing becomes stale or just plain bad. The same can happen when you stick to the same formula for everything you write, never truly exploring other ways to make your signature say more or do more for your story. There’s nothing wrong with having a certain style, or writing subplots, having some “fluff” or downtime in your narratives, but just know there’s a time and place for everything. Utilize what you know about enjoyable writing to frame your work.
Something that could have also gone a long way for Sager was character writing. Even Lock Every Door has some issues on this front, since Jules doesn’t have much of a personality that comes through, at points she feels like a stock detective character. If you write a character with a personality, motivations, and feelings, you can then work in character arcs that allow them to do things they might not have done before in a way that feels believable. If you need help figuring out how to flesh out your characters you can check out our character planner here.
That being said, I don’t think I’ll be picking up any more Riley Sager books. I’ve finally accepted that his writing just isn’t for me and that’s okay. Let me know what you think! Do you think I’m being too harsh? Is there a book here you disagree with the rating on? Do you have a favorite Sager book? Leave it all in the comments!
Thanks, and Happy Writing!
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