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Riley Sager’s Next Stop after With a Vengeance

3 Feb Book cover for “With a Vengeance” by Riley Sager, featuring a dark night scene with a train crossing a tall stone bridge under a cloudy sky lit with red tones; the author’s name appears in large turquoise text.

I preface this blog, knowing that Riley Sager fans probably already read his latest and have their opinions, so if you are one of them consider this more of a look to the future and a return to what, in my opinion, made him a best-selling author. (And it’s coming in 2026).

Riley Sager’s latest, With a Vengeance, is a title in my humble opinion, every writer deserves the right to write once they’ve reached the top of Mount Career Author – a little ‘you’ve earned this’ from their publishing house after they’ve made it clear their ROI is high, and Riley has with such calling card titles as Home Before Dark, The House Across the Lake, Lock Every Door, Final Girls, and The Only One Left. 

During a pre-release chat at Union Square’s Barnes and Noble, Mr. Sager made it clear this was his stab at a ‘whodunit’ Agatha Christie-esque entanglement on a train. With a Vengeance was not a thriller mystery with supernatural elements readers grew to love in the previous titles mentioned. 

With a Vengeance fell flat, hindered by one dimensional characters, coincidences that seemed too good to be true, a protagonist who set up a way to elaborate a scheme where everything had to go right (and her pockets had to be deep). Even with suspension of belief, the originality of intent wavered mightily throughout, and honestly, but in the end the red flags were just too much to overlook. 

When he will return to those intriguing bump-in-the-night mysteries he’s built a following off of. The answer is known. The Unknown is slated for August 2026. 

A century ago, five vanished from a Vermont island, leaving behind only five dresses and a supernatural mystery. 

A century later, a struggling actress lands a role in a movie about the disappearance, her research trip to the island turns terrifying as strange occurrences and a sudden health emergency leave her and the cast stranded. A new wave of disappearances begins, and the race is on to decipher a century-old diary to prevent the island’s dark history from claiming them all. 

I’m ready for it, and I think (at least for me) this will put the sour taste of With a Vengeance out of my mouth. 

I strongly encourage these novels by Riley Sager though: Home Before Dark, The House Across the Lake, Lock Every Door, Final Girls, and The Only One Left. 

Book cover for “Final Girls” by Riley Sager, featuring a dark forest background with a lone woman in a blue dress standing beneath red title text.
Book cover for “Lock Every Door” by Riley Sager, showing a purple-lit apartment hallway with multiple doors and bold pink title text.
Book cover for “The House Across the Lake” by Riley Sager, depicting a brightly lit house reflected in dark lake water at night, with handwritten-style yellow title text.
Book cover for “The Only One Left” by Riley Sager, showing a large, ominous house perched on a rocky cliff against a red sky, with bold blue title text.
Book cover for “Home Before Dark” by Riley Sager, featuring a dark green haunted house silhouette surrounded by glowing lights against a shadowy background.

They all show his consistent truth as a writer – telling stories built around traumatized and unreliable narrators who must face a dark event or place that resurfaces from their past, forcing them to question the realism of their memories and perceptions of the world. We aren’t just trying to figure out who the real antagonist is but also grasping with the illusion of whether the person telling the story is even telling the truth. 

Each one of these is an addicting ride.

Which novel will you be checking out? Comment below.

Riley Sager’s name and cover images are linked to his author page on the BCCLS catalog to make it easy for you to reserve his titles. 

Hit subscribe to get Hoboken Public Library Staff Picks to your email!

Written by:
Sean Willey
Information and Digital Services Assistant

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C.J Tudor’s Terror Tales: Horror Meets Old English Storytelling

7 Jan

When did you become a fan of something? You may not remember the day or time, but you probably remember the location or the product (in this blog, a book). Believe it or not, just 5ish years ago, I was a bona fide scaredy cat. I refused to watch scary movies, or if I did, I went to the 10:00 matinee or watched at home with every light on and my arms wrapped tight around my corgi pillow. 

Still, my chest pounding and the internal screaming of, “Don’t go in there!,” alongside the blood-boiling dread of a supernatural creature wrapping its ghostly tendrils around the protagonist, deeply intrigued me.

So, when did I take my captivation to the next level? Well, I was standing in the Hoboken Public Library, staring down C.J. Tudor’s (now my favorite author) novel, The Gathering. The cover shows a figure walking into a snowy, small town with a deep crimson sky roiling above her. The snow is heavy and high upon the shops. 

Ok, you got me visually. Oh, and then I read the blurb: a detective investigating a grisly crime in rural Alaska finds herself caught in the dark secrets and superstitions of a small town. 

Oh hell’s bells, a small town supernatural horror. As someone who grew up in a Wisconsin town of 999 people, this strummed my heartstrings tight. 

The first scene: a boy is found with his throat ripped out and all the blood drained from his body. 

And who does the small town think is responsible? An ostracized community of vampyrs living in an old mine settlement.

C.J. Tudor has a remarkable flair for English pub-style storytelling, mixed with the jump scares of American horror and the long-drawn-out dread made famous by Mr. King. 

After just a few weeks, I was on to the next, her first and the one that put her on the map: The Chalk Man. Next up, The Drift. Then, The Burning Girls.

I’m fascinated by the psychological dread exposed in her characters when faced with unfathomable events. She is becoming a master at blending childhood trauma with adulthood responsibilities and spinning a web of horror intermixed with societal questions. It’s not just who will survive or solve the crime, but what will survive. Is it worth it for a population to live on if they undermine and banish another? Is fear tethered to something more profound than just ignorance? What in our past lingers that only absolute terror can bring to the surface enough for us to make a decision? The classic ‘should I stay or should I go’ moment, if you will. 

The Burning Girls: a story about a troubled vicar and her daughter moving to a quaint English countryside town to run the parish, but soon find out the town is buried in worry of, you guessed it, girls who were burned alive and still haunt the town, which is now a TV series, too.  

Horror/thriller/mystery/supernatural lovers, C.J. Tudor must be on your list. 

Which novel will you be checking out? Comment below.

C.J. Tudor’s name is linked to her author page on the BCCLS catalog to make it easy for you to reserve her titles. 

Hit subscribe to get Hoboken Public Library Staff Picks to your email!

Written by:
Sean Willey
Information and Digital Services Assistant

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