Lock Every Door by Riley Sager
"'Do you think it's possible for a place to be haunted, even if there aren't any ghosts there?' she says. 'Because that's what it feels like to me. Like the Bartholomew is haunted by its history. Like all the bad stuff that's ever happened there has accumulated like dust and now floats in the air.'"
Year Read: 2019
Rating: 2/5
Context: I received a free e-ARC through First to Read from the publishers at Penguin Random House. Trigger warnings: death, body horror, abduction, violence, car accidents, fire, severe illness, severe injury, blood, hospitals, needles, stitches.
About: When Jules lands a job as an apartment sitter at the Bartholomew, one of Manhattan's most famous and upscale apartment buildings, she feels like she's been given a chance to hit the reset button on her life. Recently laid off from her job and broken up from a cheating boyfriend, the job couldn't come at a more opportune time. There are a few rules--no visitors, no bothering the residents, no nights away from the apartment--but it pays a thousand dollars a week. However, not everything is as it seems at the Bartholomew. When another apartment sitter mysteriously disappears, Jules uncovers a series of missing persons cases and discovers that the Bartholomew may be hiding a killer.
Thoughts: I waited for a hundred pages for this to get better. Then I waited for a hundred more. I'm pretty sure the only reason I made it through the end was because I had read The Last Time I Lied, and I kept waiting for Sager to pull another glorious twist out of his back pocket. I guess you could call what happens a twist, but it's far from glorious, and it in no way makes up for slogging through the rest of this book. Probably the worst thing a murdery/thrillery book can be is boring, and I was bored on every page.
Sager doesn't seem invested in either his plot or his characters here, so it's nearly impossible for his readers to be. While he goes to some lengths to establish a backstory for Jules, her personality is bland, and most of those threads are never appropriately played out. The rest of the characters are barely present long enough to be more than paper cutouts, so there's no development to be had anywhere. Most of the narrative is given over to Jules's increasingly far-fetched theories and rising paranoia, which is an emotion that rarely translates well on the page.
Worst of all, nothing really happens. The primary issue of the plot is that a girl has gone missing. Jules barely knows her, so it's hard to see why she expends so much emotional energy and rapidly depleting funds trying to locate a near-total stranger who obviously wanted to leave. The actual horror of The Bartholomew takes too long to reveal itself for adequate payoff, and it's just this side of ridiculous when it does. I like the effort Sager puts into the novel's overall themes of how poor people are more likely to go missing or come to harm, and the lengths the wealthy will go to exploit them, but overall, it comes off rather forced and silly.
