Middle of the Night

This is the latest from Riley Sager. He wrote it and, as usual, it's a good one. He lets you into the heads of all the characters. These are troubled folks and there are many twists and turns until the climax. A good read.

What It’s About: When Ethan Marsh was ten, his best friend Billy Barringer disappeared out of the tent they were sleeping in in his backyard and was never seen again. Now Ethan has returned home and the ghost of Billy is haunting him, prompting him to attempt to discover what really happened that night once and for all.Plot: This novel had more twists than I’ve ever seen in one place, and all of them were pulled off beautifully. In the end, everything connected together in a complete picture that made total sense. The characters were compelling, there was a frank discussion of trauma and how it colors everyone’s lives for decades afterwards, and everyone’s reactions to events were realistic.Style: Riley Sager’s writing is lyrical, incredibly atmospheric, and also downright creepy. It flows so well and can be read so easily that it honestly hardly feels like reading at all, which, to be clear, is a compliment.Trigger Warnings: The book is mostly centered around mental health and trauma response. There’s also a lot of death and grief, which is to be expected considering the topic of the narrative.Final Thoughts: I love Riley Sager. I’ve read every single one of his novels. It is a summer ritual for me to buy his latest book and read it in one day, then tell my friend, who won’t read thrillers because they’re too scary, the entire plot and what my guesses were as I was reading. For the record, my guesses have been halfway there or close, but never right on the money. Riley gets me every time, and I actually like that, because I read so much that I’m hard to surprise. I just wish I could do this more than once a year, but I get it. Good books take time!

30 years ago in 1994, Ethan's best friend Billy went missing from their tent in the backyard, with Ethan being the only witness, but he can't remember a thing.This was my most anticipated book of the year because, as you guys know, Home Before Dark is one of my favourites. Riley Sager + Ghosts, need i say more?Did this meet my expectations? Absolutely. I was pretty invested in this, and after being in a slump, it was quite refreshing. I loved the two different time frames, the character development, the whole sense of unease throughout.My rating = 4.5⭐️/5

Well worthy of a read. Perfect amount of spookiness and childhood summertime nostalgia. I loved the twists and turns even if they were a bit easier to pick up on than some of Sager’s other novels!

I like Sager. His books are quick, fun reads that I think are great palate cleansers between heavier, more emotional reads. Sometimes the twists do get gimmicky but I’ve grown used to them. And I don’t mean to sound so negative right off—we all have elements we dislike in books we like, right? So, anyway, I thought that the numerous twists and turns would be my primary complaint with *Middle of the Night,* and that it would be another 4 star read by Sager.However, something about *Middle of the Night* didn’t do it for me. It felt like it was stuck somewhere between unintentional satire of the genre and a serious attempt at being serious.I say this because the story unfolded for me like the amalgamation of crucial aspects of other hot thrillers (past and present) Frankensteined together. Which is not an inherently bad thing—genre fiction exists by way of books in that genre sharing elements and tropes. But they were assembled here in a way that felt both forced and rushed, like Sager wanted one thing and the story wanted the other but Sager won out.I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone but certain parts of the novel felt like I was re-watching *The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window,* that Netflix parody of AJ Finn’s *The Woman in the Window.*I still think the book was a solid 3 stars, and I don’t regret reading it. It just satisfy me the way some of his other books have.