The House Across the Lake, A Review

You’ve seen too much…

Final Girls Review. The Last Time I Lied Review. Lock Every Door Review. Home Before Dark Review. Survive the Night Review.

SPOILER WARNING. I WILL BE DISCUSSING BIG PLOT TWISTS IN THIS NOVEL SO READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.

The House Across the Lake follows Casey Fletcher, a recently widowed actress who has been banished to her family’s lake house because of her recent struggles with alcoholism. Casey spiralled into depression after her husband Len’s death and now finds comfort in bourbon, having been fired from her only stable acting job. At the lake house Casey spends her days drinking and spying on the neighbours through a pair of binoculars, having become obsessed with the couple across the lake. Katherine Royce and her husband Tom are the ultimate power couple and Casey begins repeatedly spying on them and obsessively watching their lives.

One day however Casey notices an argument break out between the pair and then begins seeing both clearly hiding things from the other. When Katherine then goes missing, Casey immediately suspects Tom has done something to her and sets out to prove it, whatever the cost. The Royce’s however are hiding a dark secret and inserting herself into their lives may do more harm than good. Can Casey get to the truth of Katherine’s disappearance or will her spying on the neighbours lead to her own tragic downfall?

The unreliable narrator witnessing a terrible crime is admittedly a story type that has been done time and time again (The Girl on the Train, The Woman in the Window, etc) but I have to admit it’s a sub genre I always love returning to. Yes, it might have been done countless times at this point but there’s a reason it works so well and a reason it’s so so popular amongst the crime fiction world. I always love seeing how each author puts their own spin on the genre and Sager here is no exception, I loved his take on the concept and I had such a good time reading this novel.

Casey was such a great and instantly likeable character and I really enjoyed following her POV across this mystery. Her own struggles with alcoholism and tragic past with husband Len gave her an intense backstory and set her up nicely into the unreliable narrator trope. Despite those around her not always taking her accusations seriously Casey fought strongly to find Katherine, often putting her own life in danger to do the right thing. Casey’s spying on the Royce’s felt very relatable and I think that everybody does have that natural curiosity about the people living next door to them and this is exactly what this novel is all about.

The titular lake house and ongoing storm definitely added to the book’s darker atmosphere and I really loved how isolated Casey was to the rest of the outside world. Reading this book there were essentially only six characters (plus some phone conversations) and so you could really feel Casey’s seclusion and how this did then turn into paranoia. When you’re all alone in the dark your mind often does play tricks on you or jump to the worst conclusions and I think here the storm and lack of any human contact really played on Casey’s psyche, prompting her to begin investigating properly. The dark and stormy weather also played into that horror factor and I loved the image of the house across the lake being one of the only light sources, almost forcing Casey to spy for lack of anything better to do, it was great visual imagery.

The twist in this novel definitely took me back and even now as I’m writing this I’m still debating whether I actually liked it or not. I’m usually not a fan of supernatural elements, especially when you don’t expect them, and so the whole body swapping plotline really took me by surprise. Up until this point the novel had been 100% based in reality and so having Len ‘live in’ Katherine or however you want to phrase it just seemed so crazy and out there. I kept waiting for the whole thing to be explained away or passed off as a joke but the characters took everything completely seriously, so I’m still not sure how I really feel.

Overall The House Across the Lake was an enjoyable read and another great success by Sager, he’s definitely one of my favourite authors. The set up, characters and stormy atmosphere all created a really gripping mystery and I think my only issue with the book was the bizzare plot twist. Overall though I liked Sager’s interpretation of the unreliable narrator trope and can’t wait to see what he comes out with next.