The girls could be anywhere. That’s what you realize as you stand in the water, shivering harder. They’re out there. Somewhere. And it could take days to find them. Or weeks. There’s a chance they’ll never be found. …
You imagine them stumbling through the thick woods, unmoored and directionless, … You think of them hungry and scared and shivering. You picture them under the water, sinking into the muck, trying in vain to grasp their way to the surface.
You think of all these things and begin to scream.
From the novel
Like several recent books, The Last Time I Lied isn’t really a horror novel, but a thriller employing the tropes of 1980’s horror movies. But it’s not about a masked killer or an evil entity. No, this is about something much more frightening: Teenage girls at summer camp. Emma Davis is our narrator and throughout Sager has her dole out bits of information like bait, and every time sets the hook in the reader, which is to say, I found this book absorbing and hard to set aside.
Emma, 13, arrives late to Camp Nightingale, missing cabin assignments for girls her age. Instead, she is assigned to Dogwood, a cabin of older girls where she meets Vivian, 16. Vivian takes on the role of older sister to Emma, an only child, often neglected by her parents and so hungry for the attention of the beautiful, confident young woman. But Vivian is mercurial, often caring and attentive, but sometimes withdrawn and sarcastic. They share the cabin with two other girls, school friends of Vivian’s and a few weeks into camp, the three older girls leave the cabin for reasons they don’t share, Vivian’s final words to Emma are, “You’re too young for this, Em.” The three girls are never seen again, leaving Emma behind, guilt-ridden because there are secrets about that night, and her part in it, she has never shared.
The scandal of their disappearance closes the camp for fifteen years. When Franny, the owner, reopens, she invites Emma back as an art instructor: Emma’s secrets have festered, leading to therapy, but also inspiring a series of paintings that gain the attention of the arts community. Franny hopes to mend their relationship, and that Emma’s presence will demonstrate the safety of the camp; Emma accepts and hopes to learn the truth of that night once back in Dogwood and again sharing it with three girls. But there are consequences to keeping secrets and consequences to digging up the secrets of others.
Early on, one of Sager’s characters references Friday the 13th, which notes the similarity of an isolated camp and a small group of people. But he – Sager is a pseudonym for Todd Ritter – has already done a slasher (Final Girls) and instead brings together two girls in various states of emotional disrepair, one young and not quite passive, the other older and dominant, and follows their dynamic. We find that Emma was taken with Vivian from the start, emulating her worldly mentor. For the brief time they knew each other, the trauma from Vivian’s disappearance and its circumstances has an outsized influence over Emma’s life, and her presence hovers over the novel, directs the course of events, influences Emma’s decisions, and is ultimately the main mystery: Why was Vivian the way she was? What was she trying to do? AS Emma tries to solve the mystery of Vivian, what mystery was Vivian trying to solve?
Meanwhile, we readers have to ferret out the source of Emma’s shame. That shame, her sense of having been implicated in her friends’ fate, makes Emma relatable. Throughout, she comes across as damaged but mostly grounded – with exceptions – still Emma’s experiences at Camp Nightingale and after act as believable motivation for her search, and credible foundations for her interpretations and misinterpretations of what she uncovers.
The Last Time I Lied in some ways reworks the themes in Final Girls, with Emma a variation on the final girl trope, and the book an improvement on that novel, its resolution both believable (mostly) and more surprising. Sager has a knack for writing realistic female characters from Emma to Franny to Vivian to other camp inhabitants like the instructors, Casey and Becca, and those three later campers, Miranda, Krystal, and Sasha, who are distinctive and well-rendered as they become enmeshed in Emma’s quest. Ultimately, though, the novel rests on the shoulders of Emma and her relationship with Vivian and I found that compelling.
THE LAST TIME I LIED by Riley Sager (2019; Dutton/Penguin)
Review by Randy Money
