Let’s be clear about something right up front: Riley Sager is a damn good thriller writer. His books, and I’ve enjoyed many of them, are twisted puzzle boxes full of juicy secrets, incredible pacing, and plotting wound tight as a drum. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and most of the time he delivers.
Which is why it’s so disappointing that Sager’s latest, The Unknown, doesn’t quite work for me. Like some of his best works (The Only One Left comes to mind), it’s a parallel journey of past and present, set in a compelling locale and featuring a cast of distinct characters. It’s also got a Hollywood horror hook that feels exactly like my cup of tea, but the more I read, the more frustrated I became. This is one of those thrillers that’s so laden with exposition and twists that, by the end, it’s a gnarled knot of information rather than a story, even if it does retain Sager’s inherent attention to craft and narrative propulsion.
Marin is a struggling actress, waiting tables between auditions for commercials and obscure plays, so it’s a big surprise for her when she gets a face-to-face audition with Ronan Peters, the hottest of Hollywood’s hotshot young directors. Even more surprising, Marin gets the part! She’s going to be a major character in a new horror film by Ronan Peters, co-starring one of her idols, the legendary Violet Wright.
Because the film is based on a real set of mysterious disappearances on an island in Vermont, Ronan aims for immersiveness and decides that his cast should spend a week on the island itself, New Avalon, where an arms manufacturer once built an estate now said to be haunted by the women who vanished there. With no electricity, no phones, and no modern clothes, Marin and her co-stars will live, rehearse, and immerse themselves in the world of New Avalon in 1926, essentially becoming the vanished women they’re set to play onscreen.
This is perhaps my favorite setup in any of Sager’s books, a meta-story about actors living out their own American Picnic at Hanging Rock for the sake of cinematic authenticity, and of course you can see where this is going. One by one, the cast starts disappearing, a medical emergency strands the whole crew on the island, and Marin, equipped with no context but a diary written by one of the vanished 1926 women, is forced to dig deep into the island’s secrets in a search for answers.
There are seances, and storms, and dark pasts, and all the wonderful, simmering substance we’ve come to expect from Riley Sager. The first half of this book is a banger, driven by Sager’s trademark lightning pace, and even when it started to go off the rails, I found myself reading late into the night, unable to put the book down until I figured out where Sager was going.
It’s tricky, of course, to explain why the back half of a book doesn’t work without delving into spoilers, but I’ll do my best. Because of the mystery surrounding the original 1926 disappearances, and the immersive environment Ronan hopes to create for his cast on the island, The Unknown spends much of its narrative questioning how much of what’s happening is real, and how much is part of the immersive experience. Characters bicker over whether or not a planchette is actually moving during a seance; they trade secrets about dead loved ones; they debate the merits of seeking help versus waiting things out.
At the center of it all is Marin, with a past of her own that motivates her in particular to seek out answers, and while that part works, the answers she eventually finds simply don’t. The novel, driven by Sager’s crystal-clear prose and always-dynamic pacing, builds up a very solid head of steam as Marin narrates, laying out the central questions in a setup for the third act, when Sager will unspool what’s really going on. It’s a trick he’s used many times before, and it usually works.
So, why doesn’t it work this time? Because reading this particular book, as opposed to Sager’s other successes, I felt like the answers and the emotional impact they have on the characters were secondary to the basic need for the story to have twists that catch the reader off-guard. Riley Sager novels don’t necessarily have just one twist; they have several, nested together to create an added tension over what’s real and what’s invention. That should be extra potent in a novel about filmmakers, and yet by the end, The Unknown is much more driven by the need to swerve the readers than the need to serve the characters and their emotional journeys.
It was less exciting than it was tiring. I just wanted to see the impact of all of these secrets and decisions and hidden details, and instead the book devolves into a state of near-constant expository dialogue, laying out layer after layer of secrets. Are the questions answered? Yes. Are the answers satisfactory? Depends on your response. Do they feel like part of a story with genuine heft? By the end, they don’t.
Again, Riley Sager’s one of our finest thriller writers, but even the best have missteps, and this was one of his for me. Maybe the old narrative tricks are wearing thin, maybe this book is over-ambitious, or maybe I just didn’t respond to it. Whatever the case, despite solid prose and pacing and a great start, this one went off the rails somewhere for me, and never got back on track.
The Unknown is available now wherever books are sold.
