East Coast Jazz-Age Gothic Extravaganza

Riley Sager, The Only One Left: a Novel

The mansion known as Hope’s End has enough terrible stories to make Disney’s Haunted Mansion look sedate and staid. Amid the waning Jazz Era, a shocking triple homicide left an entire family of Back East elite dead and mutilated. Now Lenora Hope, the only survivor, paraplegic and mute, has decided to tell her story. Working through an outdated manual typewriter, she begins unloading on a poor nurse unprepared for everything.

This is Riley Sager’s seventh thriller under this byline, and eleventh overall, in only fourteen years—a veritable assembly line of paperback chills. Working at such a pace, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Sager uses genre stereotypes. Diving into this novel, I quickly recognized allusions, some more overt than others, to Edgar Allan Poe, Daphne du Maurier, and D.H. Lawrence. And that turned out to be just for starters.

In 1983, Kit McDeere knows the Hope’s End murders as merely a lingering urban legend. Pursued by her own demons, Kit accepts a caregiver job for Lenora Hope, mostly because she can’t find anything else. When Lenora proves to be, not a daffy patient just winding down, but a crafty schemer ready to divulge secrets she’s kept hidden since 1929, Kit simply isn’t prepared for the mass of horrors dumped in her lap.

Once lavishly appointed and luxurious, Hope’s End has become a time capsule of Gatsby-era nostalgia. Lenora’s dwindling household staff preserves the house, but also basically keeps her prisoner inside an upper-story suite overlooking the Atlantic. Kit gets drawn into the building’s faded grandeur, but also into Lenora’s story, which she types painstakingly with only her left hand. The secrets, and the decaying house, take on labyrinthine proportions in Kit’s mind.

Sager emphasizes the contradiction between the house’s aspiration, and its condition. It’s beautiful, but also literally falling apart. This proves to be a metaphor for the agreed-upon fictions that keep everyone behaving politely toward one another. The staff’s autocratic matron, Mrs. Baker, works hard to maintain the illusion that nothing has changed since 1929. This illusion becomes harder and harder to maintain.

Everything exists on multiple levels. Just as the house is a metaphor for the gentlemen’s agreements binding polite society together, the dirty secrets Lenora wants to divulge are metaphors for the traumas people need to express, but can’t. Kit reads Lenora’s long-buried secrets and becomes a crusader for justice denied for over fifty years, but that’s a metaphor for the doubts and self-blame she can’t address within herself.

Riley Sager

Within these interlocking symbols, one rule of mass-market fiction is: the more assiduously characters believe something on Page One, the more thoroughly they’ll find their expectations inverted on the closing page. We readers have become accustomed to twist endings and big reveals. Therefore, authors will wedge multiple twists into the narrative, because they know we’re keeping suspect lists and testing them against accumulating evidence.

Yes, Sager does that too. I mentioned three novelists above whose work Sager channels. As the story accelerates, though, it becomes increasingly clear Sager expects his readers to know story boilerplates mostly from Hollywood, and his narrative assumes a three-act structure familiar from Syd Field screenwriting manuals. I started noticing narrative conventions pinched from filmmakers like Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Robert Aldritch.

I don’t say this to disparage Sager’s storytelling… except when I do. In later chapters, Sager’s chapter breaks start occurring on big plot reveals or cliffhangers, sometimes so pointed that readers can practically hear the soundtrack orchestra playing a dramatic flourish. Seasoned readers start observing what film critic Roger Ebert called his Law of Conservation of Characters: every named character serves a purpose, and if we don’t know it, we just don’t know it yet.

Individual readers will decide whether this bothers them. The novel’s filmic qualities give it a galloping pace that keeps readers curious, wanting to have our unresolved questions answered. We find ourselves genuinely caring about these characters, and hurting when they’re disappointed. But as cantilevered revelations start accumulating, they start straining readers’ credulity. We start wondering, sometimes out loud: could they really keep such secrets for fifty-four years?

Probably not.

Readers’ ability to enjoy this novel will match the degree to which they’re able to remind themselves it’s a novel, not reality. If readers can enjoy the allusions to classic Gothic romanticists of yore, and the movies they may still have gathering dust in their VHS collection, they’ll probably lose themselves in Sager’s contrivances. The minute we start asking questions about plausibility, we’ll yank ourselves abruptly out of the book.