All of Todd Ritter’s horror thrillers, written under the pen name Riley Sager, have made a splash on the New York Times bestseller list. Thus, his forthcoming gothic suspense book, The Unknown, which follows the disappearance of five women from a remote island in Vermont, is highly anticipated.
Since his breakout hit Final Girls in 2017, the author has become synonymous with the thriller genre. His books have since been published in over 35 countries, with over 3 million copies sold worldwide. Two of Sager’s novels, The House Across the Lake and the aforementioned Final Girls, are reportedly in the works for the big screen.
With the 10th anniversary mark of Riley Sager’s writing career on the horizon, we had a chance to sit down with the author and discuss our favorite books of his. However, all of his works are absolutely worth a read.
Taking a dive into Sager’s stellar backlist, The Lineup welcomes you into a world full of supernatural horrors and mysteries unleashed–in the hopes of summoning some early summer screams!
Final Girls
Riley Sager’s debut, Final Girls, is a cinematic slash-and-burn through horror tropes, tearing through trauma like a serrated knife. Sager smartly weaponizes, as he puts it, “film-geek speak for the last woman standing at the end of a horror movie,” delivering a sleek and tense psychological thriller.
Centering on Quincy, a massacre survivor drowning in selective amnesia, the narrative acts as “a horror movie and its sequel all rolled into one,” according to Sager. The author’s whole bibliography thrives in this murky moral territory, exposing how deep you can go with his central theme: “the price of survival is guilt.”
Final Girls holds up over a decade later. It’s a fierce, claustrophobic puzzle box that proves the real nightmare begins long after the credits roll.
The Last Time I Lied
Sager trades in the Scream-like violence of his first book for psychological wounds in this deeply unnerving camp thriller. Returning to the site of her childhood trauma, Emma is haunted by the ghosts of missing friends—and her own fractured memory.
He masterfully mimics Picnic at Hanging Rock, constructing a “claustrophobic environment where these young girls are sort of trapped” by the wilderness and their secrets. Plays a brutal game of narrative deception, Sager weaponizes Two Truths and a Lie to remind us that “sometimes lying is a survival instinct.”
The Last Time I Lied is a calculated dive into the muddy waters of survivor’s guilt.
Home Before Dark
This gothic ghost story is constructed with malicious precision. Maggie returns to Baneberry Hall, the infamous estate her father turned into a bestselling paranormal memoir, desperate to untangle truth from lucrative fiction.
Sager brilliantly balances The Amityville Horror vibe, acknowledging that “when you buy a house with a history, you buy the history, too.” The dual-narrative structure acts as a funhouse mirror, contrasting Maggie’s cold skepticism with her father’s garish chapters.
Home Before Dark is meta and deeply unsettling, showing that a house can have bad blood oozing from it.
The House Across the Lake
The House Across the Lake is a whiskey-soaked, voyeuristic nightmare that begins as an homage to Rear Window before completely shattering the glass. Casey Fletcher is an actress drowning her grief in binoculars and Lake Vermont views, convinced her glamorous neighbor is in peril.
Sager gleefully subverts expectations here, taking a vintage premise and pivoting hard into territory where nothing is what it seems, and the truth is much darker. This is a delightfully unhinged thriller that reminds us how easily a simple gaze can twist into obsession.
Sager proves that looking too closely always invites the dark inside.
The Only One Left
Sager goes full Gothic maximalist in this dizzying, cliffside bloodbath. Grounded in Lizzie Borden lore, we follow a caregiver assigned to Lenora Hope—a mute woman suspected of murdering her family decades ago.
Sager crafts a decadent “gothic mansion on a cliff that is literally crumbling into the ocean,” using the decaying architecture to reflect his characters’ psychological putrefaction. He orchestrates a breathless symphony of twists where “every single person has a secret.”
The Only One Left is a wonderfully melodramatic, hyper-stylized masterpiece of narrative whiplash that keeps you guessing until the final blow.
The Unknown
The Unknown follows the actress Marin Keane, who is shocked when she lands a role in a major motion picture about the mystery of New Avalon, an island on sprawling Lake Faraday in Vermont. The role also requires a weeklong research trip to that very spot alongside her castmates.
New Avalon isn’t your ordinary island. A century ago, it was a commune for spiritual mediums—until they all disappeared in 1926. The only trace of the missing women was five dresses hanging from the branches of an old oak tree in the middle of the island. The lead theory is that a séance went very wrong and conjured something supernatural that carried them away one by one.
Marin and her castmates hear strange noises at night and notice mysterious symbols left behind by the island’s previous occupants. Marin turns to a mysterious diary written by someone named Daisy to uncover the island’s secrets. The Unknown’s dual timelines and paranormal elements provide layers of suspense. Sager really dials up the twists to 11 in his latest book.
Featured image: Michael Livio
