Middle of the Night

The worst thing to ever happen on Hemlock Circle occurred in Ethan Marsh’s backyard. One July night, ten-year-old Ethan and his best friend and neighbor, Billy, fell asleep in a tent set up on a manicured lawn in a quiet, quaint New Jersey cul-de-sac. In the morning, Ethan woke up alone. During the night, someone had sliced the tent open with a knife and taken Billy. He was never seen again.

Thirty years later, Ethan has reluctantly returned to his childhood home. Plagued by bad dreams and insomnia, he begins to notice strange things happening in the middle of the night. Someone seems to be roaming the cul-de-sac at odd hours, and signs of Billy’s presence keep appearing in Ethan’s backyard. Is someone playing a cruel prank? Or has Billy, long thought to be dead, somehow returned to Hemlock Circle?

The mysterious occurrences prompt Ethan to investigate what really happened that night, a quest that reunites him with former friends and neighbors and leads him into the woods that surround Hemlock Circle. Woods where Billy claimed ghosts roamed and where a mysterious institute does clandestine research on a crumbling estate.

The closer Ethan gets to the truth, the more he realizes that no place—be it a quiet forest or a suburban street—is completely safe. And that the past has a way of haunting the present.

• Middle of the Night by Riley Sager
• Published by: Penguin Audio on June 18, 2024
• Genre: Thriller, mystery, paranormal
• Listening length: 11 hours 22 min
• Dates listened: 6.11.25 – 6.16.25 (6 days)
• Format: Audiobook
• Narrator: Santino Fontana
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• ⭐⭐⭐

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Riley Sager is another author that I’ve heard a lot about, but have never checked out. I’ve seen and read many reviews on some of his other books, and many of them have a 3+ month wait from my local library on Libby. That made me think, “Dang, this must be a terrific author I need to check into!” I scrolled through Libby and finally FINALLY found one of his books that was available now. Seeing as it was a book from 2024, and not one of his first books, I went into it with high hopes. Maybe that was my mistake, because I was pretty disappointed. The more and more I sit on this book, and think about it, I have to convince myself to not lower my 3 ⭐ rating. This review will for sure have some spoilers, so if those things piss you off, here’s your warning now.

We meet Ethan Marsh, the book’s protagonist, as he has just moved back into his childhood home. 30 years ago, Ethan’s best friend, Billy Barringer, was kidnapped from the tent they were both sleeping in during a sleepover in Ethan’s backyard one summer night. They never found a body, and they never found a suspect. This event has affected and shaped Ethan’s life ever since. He has difficulty trusting people, he has insomnia with nightly nightmares, and has even decided that he never wants to have kids, much to his wife’s disappointment. So, needless to say, the kidnapping and loss of his childhood best friend have left him with some unresolved trauma. So, please explain to me why parents would ship off their child, who went through a traumatizing event such as this, to a private school?! You would think that parents would be more protective, especially after something like this happened. It could have been Ethan who was taken. Why would you want to send your son away? If Ethan was struggling, did you not ever consider moving? Buy a new house! But no…let’s ship him off to go live with strangers! And why would these same parents think that having this same son move back into the same house you sent him away from, while he “gets back on his feet” and helps you sell it, is a great idea?! Ethan even states in the book that he’s avoided this house, primarily because of the trauma he went through when Billy went missing. So you’d think that his parents would be just a tad more sensitive, especially if he is in a fragile state (we later learn that his wife has recently died), and not offer for him to stay in the house to help them sell it while they move off to Florida and retire. Make it make sense!

Another one of Ethan’s childhood friends, Russ, sells Ethan a trail cam so he can catch whoever is throwing the baseballs into his yard. It’s mentioned a few times that Russ owns this sporting goods store. Not an employee. Not a manager. But THE owner, ok? And all he hooks Ethan up with is a “10% employee discount”? First off, why does the owner have an employee discount? Secondly, if you’re the owner, and all you can give your long-lost childhood friend that just returned home and is having some weird stuff going on, is a 10% discount on an expensive item from your store? Kind of a dick-ish thing to do if you ask me, but that’s just my opinion! haha

Why can’t you be normal? Why do you have to be such a weirdo? Why do you always have to be such a freak? If you like ghosts so much, why don’t you just die and become one?

There are just so many holes and things that don’t add up! Ethan’s mother, who apparently worked at the institute, gets fired the day before the kidnapping incident. Why did she get fired? I’m so glad you asked! She ran back up to work after hours and stumbled upon a ritual of some sort going on. Literally, she came upon people dressed in cloaks, chanting, and she saw there was blood and a heart (unsure if it was animal or human). Witnessing this, she’s fired and forced to sign an NDA. The next night, a child is stolen from your backyard, and you don’t even mention the weird thing you saw at your former place of employment?! NDA be damned!!! I would be screaming all over the town and the news about what I saw, and demanding that they search that entire property! If I got sued, I got sued! But we’re talking about a suspicious thing that happened the night before a child goes missing. I’m pretty sure that trumps the repercussions you’d suffer from breach of an NDA.

One of the last hangups for me…we learn that Billy actually left the tent of his own free will. The slash in the tent was made by his younger brother, Andy. That whole reasoning for why he did it was just weird to me, and I glazed over it. Whatever his intentions were, he gets scared after slashing the tent and runs home. Later, Billy randomly decides, because of his love for ghosts, that he wants to go back to the institute where he’s now learned that they study such phenomena. He decides to sneak off while Ethan is sleeping. Mind you, this is a 2-mile walk that Billy has to make through a heavy forest. So why in the hell would he do this without his shoes, in the dark?!?! All that was left of Billy when Ethan woke up that morning was his sleeping bag and his shoes. No one would hike 2 miles through a heavy forest, in the middle of the night, barefoot!! Come on now!

Soooo yeah! Maybe I’m getting too nitpicky about things, but the inconsistencies and things that just didn’t make sense sort of ruined my experience. I’m not saying I’ll never read another Riley Sager book again. Perhaps one of the cons of having so much social media attention for your books is that it causes some unfair expectations to be set, who knows? But even without the holes that drove me crazy, I felt like the characters were very one-dimensional. I had a difficult time connecting to them, or even liking them much. There were some good scenarios where Sager built tension and suspense, but everything else just felt so flat and predictable. If anyone has a good Riley Sager book that they loved and would highly recommend, please let me know!