San Marcos Public Library

The Unknown

by Riley Sager

Library Journal Sager (With a Vengeance) knows how to craft stories that intertwine real and imagined ghosts in his characters' individual and collective plotlines, with horror that feels just on the edge of what's possible (or even probable). With his latest novel, he once again shows trauma and ugliness intersecting with desire and beauty, and he delivers it with enough suspense to keep readers up far too late. A famous filmmaker casts unknown actress Marin as the main character in a movie that's based on the disappearance of five women in 1926. He brings her, along with other actresses, including a Hollywood legend and a Disney child star, to the same remote Vermont island where the women disappeared in an effort to recreate the story. Marin quickly realizes that her Hollywood dream is, in fact, a terrifying reality when she and the others find themselves without cell phones, living by 1926 practices, witnessing the shocking disappearances of other cast members, and encountering ghosts as the plot twists reveal ugliness at every turn. VERDICT Fans won't be disappointed in Sager's unsettling, psychologically driven horror story, with plenty of film industry details adding glamour, grit, and a lot of potential for performances gone awry.—Emily Bowles

Kirkus Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there? Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.” This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly Sager (With a Vengeance) offers a canny take on the closed-circle whodunit in this suspenseful tale of mysterious disappearances on an island in New England. Marin Keane, whose on-screen résumé consists of little more than eczema commercials, is ecstatic when she’s cast as the lead in renowned director Ronan Peters’s new film. The script is based on the diary of a woman who disappeared alongside four others in 1926 on New Avalon, an island in a Vermont lake. To research their roles, Marin and her costars—including legendary actor Violet Wright—take a studio-funded trip to New Avalon, where they’re expected to wear period dress and live without modern conveniences, including cell phones. Not long after their arrival, Marin hears disturbing noises in the night, and is visited by the ghost of her sister, Molly, whose death Marin feels responsible for. Then, one by one, cast members go missing, in the same order as the characters they portray, leaving nothing behind but their dresses. Sager spruces up well-worn genre tropes with aplomb, and though the plot twists don’t measure up to the author’s most jaw-dropping, they’re still plenty effective. Sager’s many fans will walk away satisfied. Agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary. (Aug.)

Book list What do you do if you’re an actor looking for a break, and one of the biggest directors in Hollywood offers you a part? Well, if you’re Marin Keane, with only one embarrassing commercial on your resume, you take the job. Even if you haven’t seen the script, and the entire production is shrouded in secrecy. Even if it means you’ll be spending weeks on a remote island, pretending to be a woman who lived there a century earlier . . . and even if you might be recreating events that led to a tragic mystery that remains unsolved. Sager’s new Gothic-tinted mystery is guaranteed to please not only his fans but anyone who enjoys an atmospheric, claustrophobic story that never quite goes where the reader expects it to. A story like this one depends on the strength of its characters, and Sager has created some of his most interesting ones so far; he makes the reader begin to care about them just as the bad things start to happen. Another winner from a master of the genre.

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