Survive the Night

Starred review from April 5, 2021
Thriller Award finalist Sager (Home Before Dark) elevates a standard suspense trope—a young woman trapped in a car with a stranger she fears is a serial killer—in this stellar nail-biter set in 1991. Charlie Jordan blames herself for the death of Maddy, her best friend and roommate at New Jersey’s Olyphant University. A day after Charlie let Maddy walk back from a bar to their dorm on her own after an argument, Maddy’s corpse was found. She was stabbed multiple times and one of her teeth was removed, the hallmark of a two-time murderer dubbed the Campus Killer. Wracked with guilt and self-loathing, Charlie resolves to leave in the middle of the semester, and finds a ride home to Ohio with Josh Baxter, a janitor employed by Olyphant driving to the state to tend to his ill father. Charlie soon suspects Josh has been lying to her about who he is. Her tendency to create movies in her mind makes her perceptions unreliable, even to herself. Sager excels at playing with reader expectations and in concocting plausible, gut-wrenching twists. Fans of Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying will be pleased. Agent: Michelle Brower, Aevitas Creative Management.

April 15, 2021
A hellish road trip from the author of Home Before Dark (2020) and Lock Every Door (2019). After her roommate and best friend is murdered, Charlie Jordan decides that she has to get away from Olyphant University. She's posting a flyer looking for someone to give her a ride home when she meets a stranger who just happens to be going her way. This is Sager's fifth novel, and readers familiar with his brand of psychological horror know that he favors high-concept plots. Here, the whole narrative unfolds over one long, eventful night in 1991. Sager's fans may also recognize that Charlie fits a type. She's a heroine who doesn't seem much interested in self-preservation; another way to put that is that she behaves in ways that are astonishingly stupid--again and again and again. In the opening pages, she spends a lot of time wondering if it seems reasonable for a young woman who just lost her friend to a serial killer to travel across two states with a man she's never met. It doesn't seem reasonable at all, but this is what has to happen if Sager is going to write the story he wants to write, so....The whole first half of the novel is Charlie discovering that her driver may not be who he says he is, that he may plan to do her harm. This feels like a lot of time to spend establishing something that every reader is going to assume. The back end, though, is filled with twists. When these dramatic turns are genuinely surprising, it's because they are absurdly baroque. In other instances, they are as inevitable as the denouement of a Greek tragedy. Oh, and there's also some business about Charlie's love of classic film and history of trauma combining to create a singular condition in which she momentarily leaves reality behind and gets lost in cinematic fantasy. This makes very little sense, but it's occasionally important to the plot. Despite its flaws, readers who decide to just give in and go along for the ride will have a diverting couple of hours ahead of them. Suspenseful--and silly.

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May 15, 2021
In 1991, Charlie, grief-stricken over the murder of her close friend (a victim of the so-called Campus Killer), accepts a ride to Ohio from Josh, a fellow student at Olyphant University. But soon she begins to suspect that Josh may not be telling the complete truth about himself. Is it possible that Charlie could be sitting in the passenger seat beside the Campus Killer? Sager's latest thriller has two big things going for it: richly textured characters and a story that absolutely refuses to follow a straight line, producing one startling revelation after another. Charlie, who was named after the heroine in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, must take a page out of her namesake's book, subtly sparring with Josh as she attempts to determine if her fears about him are justified. Sager has been turning out one fine thriller after another since Final Girls, his 2017 breakout novel, and this one just might be his best yet. It's certainly his most complex.

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