I did not intend to follow one Riley Sager book with another, but since what I was reading wasn’t working for me, and since my rental of this one was due to expire soon, I decided to give it a go.
This one is weird. In some ways, it’s better than what Sager has written but in others, it’s probably my least favorite. It’s a haunted house tale and he gets the atmosphere of a haunted house down pat. I’m not a horror guy; I wasn’t feeling chills or anything. But I was definitely moved by what he was trying to do.
The flip side is I couldn’t get into the lead character at all. I just had no investment in her. And I think that’s in part because of the sliding doors book-within-a-book technique Sager employs here. In his other novels, the back story of his lead characters is parceled out by them. Here, it’s parceled out by the protagonist’s father in his book on the haunted house, which we don’t know if it’s true or not. It has an interesting resolution but that also made it tough to care.
So it’s kind of a Frankenstein’s monster of a book, where the sum of the parts are better than the whole. But it’s still consistent with Sager’s other work. He hits all the familiar beats and he’s such a smooth writer that you could teach him for a class, even to those (like me) who don’t really like horror.