The moral of the story really comes down to, “nothing good ever comes from Craigslist” and “rich people are fucked up.” So read it if those things appeal to you.

It felt like things were held back too long and the timing was off.ĭespite those couple of things, it’s still a compulsively readable and suspenseful book thanks to Sager’s masterful grasp of prose and setting creation.

I did totally feel like I knew her as a person, but I would have liked to see things start to happen sooner in the plot, even if it was just cursory to Jules’ personal issues. Sager takes his time to create suspense around the events in the building, focusing a lot of page space on character building for Jules. As she digs into it, Jules finds her missing friend isn’t the only apartment sitter to disappear from the Bartholomew without a trace. Then her only friend in the building goes missing. The tenants are odd, old and standoffish. Sager keeps it 100 with his hot takes by working them into the plot, and not getting preachy.Īfter moving in, things start to get creepy and mysterious. Again, you are getting that wealth inequality commentary. It’s a tale as old as time.īut really, Jules feels like she doesn’t have much of a choice. Jules is couch-surfing at a friend’s place after breaking up with her cheating dude-bro-lite boyfriend and losing her under-paying job. That’s all I’ll say about that because I don’t want to get into spoilers.Īs much as I liked the angle the plot ended up taking, I found the build-up to the meat of the story to be a bit slow, and probably because of this, the ending was anti-climatic. Now there’s a horror story, she says in Canadian. There are some elements included in the plot that are a bit misleading – is it a ghost story? Horror? Is there something satanic going on? But Sager takes that part of Rosemary’s Baby and flips it on its head to create commentary about U.S. Lock Every Door is Rosemary’s Baby meets the United States poverty gap and healthcare. And he’s built a writing career around paying homage to those favourite influences in the most satisfying way for me as a reader. He and I should obviously be best friends because we like all the same things. However, this third novel by Sager is just not as strong an offering as his previous two. Please don’t look at my less-than-enthused review as a reason to not read this book, because everything Sager writes is a book to read, imho. If I had never read Final Girls or The Last Time I Lied, would I be giving this a higher rating? Maybe. Filed Under: The entitlement of the rich.

Lock every door riley sager summary