68 pages • 2 hours read
Riley SagerThe Last Time I Lied: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Riley Sager and Psychological Thrillers
Riley Sager is the pen name of Todd Ritter, an American author who formerly worked as a journalist and editor. Ritter published three novels known as the Kat Campbell Series under his given name between 2010 and 2013 and one novel under the pen name Alan Finn in 2014. In 2017, Ritter published Final Girls, his first novel under the name Riley Sager, which has since become associated with page-turning psychological thrillers. The Last Time I Lied is Ritter’s second novel as Sager, and he has continued to write many New York Times Best Sellers, including Home Before Dark (2020) and The House Across the Lake (2022).
Sager is known for fast-paced mysteries with multiple twists and turns. His protagonists are always female, and many have compared his work to psychological thrillers “rooted in the inner worlds of women,” like Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and Girl on a Train by Paula Hawkins (Gamerman, Ellen. “These Male Authors Don’t Mind if You Think They’re Women.” The Wall Street Journal, 17 July 2017). Sager’s first novels didn’t include an author photo or gender-specific information in his biography. While the author’s true identity was never kept a secret, some critics have suggested that Sager writes under a gender-neutral pseudonym to draw in more female readers and to lend credibility to his female protagonists.
Cultural Context: Summer Camp in Popular Culture
Sager has acknowledged that The Last Time I Lied was inspired by the 1975 Australian mystery film Picnic at Hanging Rock. The film, based on the 1967 novel of the same name, tells the story of a group of students from an all-girls boarding school who mysteriously vanish with their teacher during a Valentine’s Day picnic. By setting The Last Time I Lied in a summer camp, Sager taps into a collective cultural fascination with adolescents’ first taste of independence away from their parents. For many children, camp is their first time away from home for an extended period of time, and this independence is both enticing and threatening. The wilderness settings of such camps contributes to the mystique, as the juxtaposition of children’s new found freedom with the vast inscrutability of nature makes for an eerie setting; the locale both dwarfs human endeavors and suggests the life-or-death consequences a poor decision can have. Furthermore, summer camp is an impactful experience for many and creates lifelong memories. Sager and other authors examine how these formative memories can shape an individual’s life for good or ill.
The Last Time I Lied joins several other literary works that have drawn inspiration from the summer camp setting and explored what happens when campers inexplicably vanish. These include the 1989 short story “Death by Landscape” by Canadian author Margaret Atwood and Shirley Jackson’s 1957 “The Missing Girl.”
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