The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager
Riley Sager’s The House Across the Lake is another doozy (do you remember Survive the Night?).
The plotline sounds so promising, interesting. Casey Fletcher is a 35-year-old woman who is from a famous family. She is reeling from the recent death of her husband, drowning her sorrows in the warm arms of alcohol. After having a publicity nightmare, Casey’s famous mother sends Casey to their family lake house to lie low. While relaxing and drinking to the max, Casey spies her new neighbor Katherine, also a famous actress, in a swimming mishap. Casey jumps at the chance to rescue Katherine, and the two strike up a quick friendship.
However, Katherine disappears. What happened to her? And who is responsible?
The first 50% of the book is boring, and the last half of the book is eye-rollingly bad. At the beginning of the book, there is an information dump of Casey’s background. No subtle discoveries here.
Casey also uses her binoculars to spy on her neighbors. This could have been a very promising storyline, but it wasn’t. The spying neighbor would have been better with some steam. Sager does try to write some of it as steamy but the attempt falls flat.
Contributing to this miss is the narrator. Although the narrator, Bernadette Dunne, is acclaimed, she is the wrong choice for The House Across the Lake. As mentioned earlier, Casey Fletcher is 35 years old. For reference, Megan Fox is 36 years old. However, Bernadette Dunne is around 60 years old (according to my internet sleuthing).
Just to be clear, Dunne is a terrific narrator, and she has credits under her belt such as Memoirs of a Geisha (which I loved). I just had an extremely difficult time matching this narrator’s voice to our main character.
The storytelling is just off in this book. Recently, I was reading a book, Daemon Voices, a collection of essays about storytelling by my favorite author, Philip Pullman. In one of his essays, he set the scene as storytellers standing on corners, telling their stories. With every sentence, the author has to try to keep the people entertained, enraptured, or else the audience will get bored and go listen to another story. In this case, I feel that Sager should have worked more on his storytelling skills, because The House Across the Lake did not hold my attention.
In Daemon Voices, Pullman stated that he wrote about a dozen different version of His Dark Materials. He has a commitment to quality. I would like that same commitment to quality from Riley Sager. He needs to fire his editor and get some additional beta readers. This book makes me really sad because 1) I feel a bit cheated out of my money and 2) Riley Sager is capable of so much more. He does need to get rid of the “yes” people on his team though.
Overall, this book is boring and gets worse from there.
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