Book Review - Riley Sager's The Only One Left
The Only One Left by Riley Sager
Published by: Dutton
Publication Date: June 20th, 2023
Format: Hardcover, 400 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy
Kit McDeere is out of options. When she became a caregiver she never thought it would mean that years would pass by without barely even noticing. The patients changed, the routine didn't. And then her name was splashed across the papers. She was taking care of her mother who had terminal Cancer. Only her mother died of a drug overdose. Her name has been cleared but it is not clean and no one is willing to take a chance on her. No one except for another person with nothing left to lose. Lenora Hope was an urban legend when Kit was growing up. There was a rhyme and everything, "At seventeen, Lenora Hope. Hung her sister with a rope. Stabbed her father with a knife. Took her mother’s happy life. 'It wasn’t me,' Lenora said. But she's the only one not dead." Kit never thought Lenora was real, and yet she is. Lenora needs constant care, she's in her seventies and confined to a wheelchair from a series of strokes. The only way she can communicate is using her left hand, mainly taping out yes or no answers. And yet when Kit arrives at Hope's End she is terrified of this bedridden woman. It doesn't help that the previous beloved nurse disappeared in the night never to be heard from again. The story that Kit is told, that she had to leave for a family emergency, doesn't add up. Especially when Kit tries to put unpack in her new room. Because there is no room for her possessions because their place is taken up with the previous nurse's possessions. Clothes, books, even her medical kit. This doesn't make any sense. The other staff aren't that comforting, a house keeper, a cook, a young maid, and a groundskeeper. They all seem to be a part of the pall that hangs over the estate. And as for the house itself? How does anyone live here? The floor is canted as the whole house leans towards the ocean, promising that one day it will crash off the cliffs into the cold waters below. Could that be what happened to her predecessor? One day she got too close to the edge and over she went? Kit doesn't know what or who to trust, is the schoolyard chant tainting her perceptions, or are the cracks in the walls getting bigger, the creaks in the night, the shadows under the crack in the door to Lenora's room, everything is imbued with menace. And yet, she stays, because Lenora is able to laboriously type with her left hand, and she has promised to tell Kit the truth. But what if the truth is the most dangerous secret of all?
Riley Sager perfectly understands the building blocks of a good Gothic novel. It all goes back to family and location. Just think of Flowers in the Attic, AKA incest in the attic, the Gothic pulp of it's day, family and location. Here we have two families full of secrets and a location that is to die for, literally, it might just collapse into the ocean at a moments notice. The way that Sager weaves Lenora Hope's tragic history of lost love is the stuff of Gothic nightmares. A mother, father, and sister tragically murdered, and her, alone, living at the scene of the crime, trapped forever in the past, with only her loyal retainers. A woman who should be a subject of pity but instead is a subject of fear. Fear that works it's way into Kit McDeere's mind as her own family trauma is revealed. A mother dead, the Cancer was killing her but that isn't the cause of death. That death is why Kit is at Hope's End. But there's more. There's always more with Sager, and the way these two women's lives start to come together shows what a master storyteller he is. As for the house? I never really feel that a book can be considered Gothic without a memorable location. There are so many pretenders out there who don't realize this necessity. Hill House, Manderley, Wuthering Heights, Belasco House, and now Hope's End, these are the gold standard. These are places you dream about, places that haunt you. Places you never want to visit but after you read about can never leave. Hope's End is perfection, in the most decrepit, moldering, uninhabitable way possible. It's not just that the evidence of the murders still lingers, blood spots on the stairs, a missing pool table, and a broken chandelier, it's that the house is literally falling into the ocean. You could call it hubris to build a house on a cliff, but that just adds to Lenora's father haunting her forever, his vanity destroyed her in more ways than one. But what really got to me was the fact that once you're on the second floor there's a cant the house. It is leaning towards oblivion. This makes Hope's End a kind of fun house, or should I more correctly say a house of horrors? An attraction at a local fair that has an air of menace about it, where dark carnies prowl the space between tents, and the fun house is the most terrifying place you could be trapped. Every second that they stay in the house is a second too long. You know as they do, that everything will come crashing down in the end, but the wait for that end is agonizing. This book had me reading with baited breath, a not uncommon occurrence with Sager's writing, but the ending crashed on me like the weight of those stones on the ocean as Hope's End fell. That was some ride.
Death at the Dress Rehearsal by Stuart Douglas
