Books like The Only One Left

Home Before Dark is Sager's most direct gothic exercise before The Only One Left. Maggie Holt returns to Baneberry Hall, a Vermont mansion her family abandoned when she was five, to renovate it and disprove her father's bestselling account of the ghosts inside. Sager alternates between Maggie's present-day renovation and her father's published ghost story, creating two competing narratives that the reader must judge without knowing which narrator to trust.

The structural parallel to The Only One Left is exact: both novels use a past account (Lenora's typed confession, Ewan Holt's book) embedded within a present investigation, and both force their protagonists to question whether the person telling the old story is lying, confused, or both. Maggie shares Kit McDeere's determination to find the truth inside a house that resists being understood. The Vermont setting gives both novels a cold, isolated quality that raises the stakes of being wrong.

Sager's command of the haunted-house genre here is the strongest rehearsal for the gothic ambitions of The Only One Left.

The Last Time I Lied sends Emma Davis back to Camp Nightingale, where three girls vanished during her first summer there fifteen years ago. Emma returns as an art instructor, ostensibly to teach but actually to dig into the disappearance she has never stopped thinking about. Sager builds the same kind of tension here that powers The Only One Left: a protagonist entering a place soaked in old violence, knowing the official story is wrong but not knowing what the real story will cost to uncover.

Emma and Kit McDeere share a recklessness born from guilt, both women driven to investigate because they feel personally responsible for something they did not cause. The camp setting does not have the same gothic grandeur as Hope's End, but Sager uses it to similar effect, creating a place where the past is physically present in the landscape. The alternating timeline structure works identically in both novels, revealing past events in a sequence designed to maximize the impact of each revelation.

This is Sager at his most controlled, building a trap and letting the reader walk into it willingly.

Final Girls introduced Sager's career-long obsession with survivors and the stories they tell about what happened to them. Quincy Carpenter survived a massacre at a secluded retreat, became tabloid famous as a Final Girl, and rebuilt her life around the fiction that she has moved on. When another Final Girl dies and a third shows up on her doorstep, Quincy's carefully maintained stability disintegrates.

The connection to The Only One Left runs through the figure of the survivor: Lenora Hope and Quincy Carpenter are both women defined by a single night of violence, both suspected of knowing more than they admit, and both living in the gap between what happened and what they can bear to remember. Sager writes both women with empathy and suspicion in equal measure, never letting the reader settle into certainty about their innocence. The modern urban setting of Final Girls differs sharply from Hope's End's crumbling gothic, but Sager's technique of withholding key information until the final act is identical in both.

This is where Sager's voice first crystallized.

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia takes a socialite from 1950s Mexico City and drops her into High Place, a moldering English-style mansion in the countryside where her newlywed cousin has sent a desperate letter begging for help. Moreno-Garcia writes the house the way Sager writes Hope's End: as a living thing that digests the people inside it. The walls of High Place are literally sick, and the family that built them has been feeding off outsiders for generations.

Both novels use a newcomer protagonist, a woman arriving at a decaying estate with practical intentions, who gradually realizes the house's history is not just backstory but an active threat. Noemi Taboada shares Kit McDeere's combination of courage and stubbornness, refusing to leave when every sign tells her to run. Moreno-Garcia leans into supernatural horror more explicitly than Sager, but the gothic infrastructure is the same: isolated mansion, controlling family, buried crimes, and a heroine who must dig through generations of lies to survive.

The 1950s Mexican setting gives the novel a colonial dimension that deepens the horror beyond anything personal.

The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn puts an agoraphobic psychologist inside her New York brownstone and lets her watch her neighbors until she sees something she should not have.

While the setting is urban rather than gothic, Finn and Sager share a commitment to unreliable narration as the engine of suspense. Anna Fox, like Kit McDeere, is a woman whose perceptions the reader wants to trust but cannot fully verify. Both authors use their protagonist's mental state as a source of doubt, creating a reading experience where the ground keeps shifting beneath your feet.

Finn layers his mystery with references to classic noir films, giving the novel a self-aware quality that matches Sager's gothic allusions in The Only One Left. The brownstone becomes as much a prison as Hope's End, trapping Anna in a space where she can see out but cannot escape. Both novels also share the theme of a woman whose professional skills, nursing for Kit and psychology for Anna, should equip her to understand what she is witnessing but instead give her just enough knowledge to be dangerously wrong.

Lock Every Door by Riley Sager confines Jules Larsen inside the Bartholomew, a Manhattan apartment building that offers suspiciously generous temporary housing. Jules needs the money too badly to ask the right questions, and by the time she starts asking them, leaving has become complicated.

The Bartholomew is Sager's other great building, a counterpart to Hope's End that trades coastal decay for urban elegance while maintaining the same sense of a structure that consumes its inhabitants. Jules shares Kit's working-class practicality, and both women take jobs that put them inside dangerous buildings because they cannot afford to say no.

Sager builds the Bartholomew's menace through details, the too-helpful staff, the rules that make no sense, the previous tenants who left without a trace, using the same accretion of wrong notes that makes Hope's End feel increasingly hostile. The novel's pacing is faster than The Only One Left, closer to a chase than a slow burn, but both books deliver the same final-act acceleration where every withheld detail arrives at once.

An Anonymous Girl by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen follows Jessica Farris, a makeup artist who enrolls in a psychology study for quick cash and finds herself being manipulated by the researcher running it. The power dynamic between Jessica and Dr. Shields mirrors the relationship between Kit and Lenora in The Only One Left: a younger woman entering an older woman's domain, initially in control of the practical situation but gradually losing her footing as the older woman's intelligence and agenda become clear.

Both novels turn on the question of who is studying whom. Hendricks and Pekkanen write psychological control with the same precision Sager brings to his atmospheric dread, building a sense of entrapment that is social rather than physical. The modern urban setting feels nothing like Hope's End, but the emotional architecture is identical: a protagonist who walked in voluntarily and cannot figure out how to walk back out.

The dual-perspective structure gives readers more information than Jessica has, creating a different kind of tension than Sager's withholding approach, but both techniques serve the same goal of making the reader feel complicit in the protagonist's danger.