“The House Across the Lake” by Riley Sager starts pretty interesting but as you keep reading, it starts to drag on. I felt several chapters going back and forth between “Before” and “Now” were repetitive. It took way too long for a real plot twist to happen as this was a slog to get through between the 20% – 70% mark of this novel.
I felt that many situations involving the main protagonist’s drinking adventures, Casey, could have been truncated to make this novel tighter and a better read. A lot of these situations kept repeating themselves and honestly felt like fluff to me. This novel could have easily been about 100 pages shorter and it would have been a better reading experience. It starts creepy, fizzles out tremendously for a huge chunk of the novel, and by the time things get creepy again, it happens a lot later than it should have.
When it comes to the dialogue and conversations between characters, I also noticed that a lot of things continued to be repeated to the point where I started to get frustrated because it’s a recurring theme. I’m all about a great story and the development of characters, but why explain a situation and then have that same situation repeated all over again in dialogue? I kept saying to just get to the point already and again, stop dragging things on.
Don’t worry, I won’t ruin anything for you but towards the end when things finally get interesting, it does get boring because again, Sager keeps fleshing the obvious out to the point of no control. I wish things were edited down a bit and made sure that every word counted, not elaborate on every little thing three or four times over just to add more pages for the sake of adding more pages.
When it came to the ending, I also felt it was unrealistic considering what went down with the lake and what eventually gets revealed. It’s like reading two different stories when it would have been better to simply stick to the creepiness of the lake and run with that, not trying to jam in something else that didn’t need to be added in. It just felt very unbelievable and took me out of the reading experience entirely, which I’ve dealt with in the past with Sager in “Survive the Night” with unrealistic situations and endings that would never, ever happen in the real world.
Overall, I give “The House Across the Lake” by Riley Sager a 2/5 as I did enjoy the plot twists but they came way too late. I wish more was explained about Lake Greene to wrap things up and not have all this fluff that just made for a mostly boring reading experience. I should have learned from “Survive the Night” but make no mistake about it, I am done with reading anything Sager writes from here on out.
by LTJ81