RILEY SAGER’S STORY isn’t one of overnight success. Rather, his ascent to becoming a New York Times bestselling author was long and arduous, peppered with changes to his pen name on early published work that didn’t catch fire in the way his last 10 novels have.
“I take stock of how my career has transpired all the time,” Sager says. “Especially with The Unknown because it’s book 10. There’s a lot of nostalgia for me and my publishing team who have been with me this entire time. It’s been a nice chance to look back and just appreciate what we’ve accomplished.”
His most recent accomplishment comes in the form of The Unknown, a novel set around the disappearances of five women in 1926 and 100 years later, when similar events begin to transpire once again.
In celebration of The Unknown, Sager is currently touring to promote his latest novel, with a stop planned in Trafalgar at the Indian Creek Performing Arts Center on August 7.
Sager, who is originally from Pennsylvania and now lives in New Jersey, has churned out a novel a year since 2017 and says that the idea for his latest work was one he ruminated on for over two decades.
“I was young, considering being a writer, and looking up creepy things online. I found this story about this tree in the middle of a swamp with white dresses hanging from the branches. No one knew the meaning behind it, and it really disturbed me. I filed that away and considered that if I ever became a writer someday, maybe I would use that idea,” he says.
The start of Sager’s career dates back to 2010 when he first published the Kat Campbell series, a trilogy of mystery novels that he penned under his legal name, Todd Ritter. After these three novels failed to gain the notoriety that later works such as 2017’s Final Girls did, he published Things Half In Shadow in 2014 as Alan Finn. And still, his work had trouble getting off the ground.
As a final effort, though, Sager pitched Final Girls to his agent, who ultimately gave him the green light, but it came with the stipulation that it would need to be under a new pen name in order to distance itself from the poor sales of Ritter and Finn.
“When I wrote Final Girls, I was in a bad place,” Sager says. “I had been laid off at my newspaper job and dropped by my publisher. I had nothing going for me at the moment and a limited skill set, so this was my last ditch attempt at trying to find success in publishing. I sent my agent a synopsis of Final Girls, and I ended up writing it in 9 weeks. … I poured everything into it as an act of desperation, and it taught me to just leave it all on the road.”
That last ditch attempt has since turned into 4 million copies of his work sold in 40 countries and praise from some of the genre’s best, including Stephen King, Ruth Ware, and R.L. Stine.
But even though the ink may have just dried on his latest book, Sager still hasn’t put the pen down.
“I’m on tour for book number 10 currently, and I finished book number 11 last month, which will come out in 2027,” he says. “When I return from this current tour, I’ll start thinking about the plot for my twelfth novel, and I’ll send a synopsis to my editor where she’ll weigh in. Then, it’s on to starting to write the next one.”
And while the pages keep coming for Sager, so do the thrills for both his readers and those closest to him.
