No spoilers here, just a sense of what you are in for should you read the book without stealing any of the fun.
Pick a Card
Middle of the Night by Riley Sager boldly delivers a compelling mystery right up front, immediately triggering our hypervigilant detective mode. We are launched into the story already looking for clues to solve the specific case at hand: a boy is missing, and no one knows how it happened. By making the novel’s central question so clear up front, Sager dares the reader to get ahead of the story.
It’s the magician starting the show by saying “pick a card”. The audience is immediately ahead of things, thinking “oh, it’s this trick, okay, I know how this goes.” They know that whatever happens to that card — whether it’s cut into pieces or locked in a box or placed randomly back into the deck — magician will somehow make the card appear again. Ta-da. Yet even knowing exactly what is about to happen, the magician fools them anyway. And, of course, that’s exactly what the audience is hoping for.
Like that magician, Sager expertly stays ahead of the reader, slowly drawing us into his world, using character backstory and methodical reveals to heightening the impact of twists we know are coming, yet, happily, manage to shock us anyway when they hit.
The key to this journey is Ethan Marsh, the sole witness to his friend’s disappearance yet completely in the dark about what really happened. Ethan is the perfect vehicle for this ride because he has stakes in the game and very little information. His best friend disappeared and he fears he’s not free of blame. He’s desperate to answer all the questions, and just as shocked as we are when the answers come.
The mystery of the missing boy hooks us from the start. But what drives us through the story is a growing suspicion this missing boy, gone for decades now, might be returning.
Haunted Houses
I love it when a book turns mundane worlds turn scary settings, the most obvious being the haunted house. In the case of Middle of the Night we find ourselves in a haunted cul-de-sac. Hemlock Circle hides a dark history, the homes and the families living there touching the central mystery in unique ways that serve to complicate the inciting incident and heighten the suspense.
Sager keeps us squarely in this neighborhood of secrets, seamlessly moving between two general timelines. Each thread is expertly crafted to build on the other, with details from the past revealed only when they add maximum suspense to events in the present, and visa-versa. Just when past incidents seem to explain lingering questions, they take unexpected turns completely earned and utterly enjoyable.
Tricks of the Trade
One interesting technique Sager employs is keeping our hero, Ethan, in the first person while all other characters are told from the more distant third person perspective.
Ethan’s story being in first person keeps us in the moment with him, knowing what he knows but limited by what he doesn’t. “I wake with a start, unnerved by the sound zipping across the dark room”. We identify with him, we understand how deeply this missing kid - his best friend - impacts his entire life.
But there is something ominous when the book moves to third person, which is anytime we follow other characters, or move to previous timelines. The moment we find ourselves out of Ethan’s thoughts and into this omniscient view, it feels like we’re now watching documentary footage, and maybe we don’t want to see what is about to happen.
The third person accounts are like the trail camera Ethan posts in the woods: when he gets the alert on his phone that something moved in front of the camera, we are right with him in his dread of seeing what the lens caught. Probably a deer, but, like Ethan, we’re afraid to find out his imagined ghosts might be real. By switching from Ethan’s first person thoughts to a third person perspective in the telling of other character’s stories, we get a similar dread, that these people are not who Ethan thought, and now we are going to see the truth . . . and we’re not so sure we want to know.
Sager’s writing here is deceptively simple, effortlessly going from a present moment to a memory that becomes its own scene and back again, filling the reader’s imagination with a rich history of two characters and their full backstory without ‘leaving’ the scene.
The pace of the twists make this a propulsive read, which peaks as past and present begin to mirror each other in clever ways, the same locations hosting both timelines as truths are revealed.
Middle of the Night breezes by like a wind through the surrounding woods, the haunted cul-de-sac staying with you long after its mysteries are solved. Because when all is known, Sager leaves room for the unknown to live on. It’s quite the magic trick.
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