I recently finished The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager. I had read Survive the Night by him, and I appreciate how his narratives can take place in a limited location. I expected the novel to have a twist, and I certainly didn’t see it coming.
>!The novel is basically a spin on Rear Window in which the main character, Casey Fletcher, an alcoholic actress of some renown, thinks the neighbor across the street may have murdered his wife. There are really only two possible suspects that make any sense, so I was expecting a kind of crazy twist, but it was crazier than expected. Casey’s alcoholism is apparently because of the death of her husband who drowned in the titular lake a year ago. Well, it turns out the husband didn’t murder his wife. Instead, she apparently became possessed by the dead spirit of Casey’s husband, which apparently was lurking in the lake. Instead, the woman’s husband was keeping her tied up because she was possessed by this man. Oh, and the death of Casey’s husband wasn’t an accident. Casey herself killed him after discovering that he’s a serial killer that murdered three girls. So, no the woman in the house across the lake wasn’t murdered by her husband. She was possessed by the spirit of the protagonist’s serial killer husband who the protagonist had murdered after learning his secret. It’s just a bit too much for the novel to handle, and what’s worse is that there’s no real hint of the supernatural before the twist, except for some ominous descriptions of the lake. As a twist it was surprising, but it was so convoluted that it absolutely lost me.!<
by TomBirkenstock