but books are better: Book Review: SURVIVE THE NIGHT by Riley Sager

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Read: June 2021

Expected publication: 23 Dec 2021

My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟

Book Description:

It's November 1991. George H. W. Bush is in the White House, Nirvana's in the tape deck, and movie-obsessed college student Charlie Jordan is in a car with a man who might be a serial killer.

Josh Baxter, the man behind the wheel, is a virtual stranger to Charlie. They met at the campus ride board, each looking to share the long drive home to Ohio. Both have good reasons for wanting to get away. For Charlie, it's guilt and grief over the murder of her best friend, who became the third victim of the man known as the Campus Killer. For Josh, it's to help care for his sick father. Or so he says. Like the Hitchcock heroine she's named after, Charlie has her doubts. There's something suspicious about Josh, from the holes in his story about his father to how he doesn't seem to want Charlie to see inside the car's trunk. As they travel an empty highway in the dead of night, an increasingly worried Charlie begins to think she's sharing a car with the Campus Killer. Is Josh truly dangerous? Or is Charlie's suspicion merely a figment of her movie-fueled imagination?

What follows is a game of cat-and-mouse played out on night-shrouded roads and in neon-lit parking lots, during an age when the only call for help can be made on a pay phone and in a place where there's nowhere to run. In order to win, Charlie must do one thing--survive the night.

What attracted me to this book:

Even though I think that Sager’s books are written for a different audience than me, I still find myself weirdly drawn to them. So if you, too, suffer from FOMO then you best give in to the hype and judge for yourself.

My musings:

Charlie is so traumatised and riddled with guilt over the death of her best friend Maddy at the hands of the “campus killer” that she decides to leave her college mid-term to return home to Ohio to see her grandmother. Seeing she doesn’t drive since the death of her parents in a car crash, she posts an ad on the campus noticeboard looking for a lift. Despite being suspicious of strangers since her friend’s murder, she accepts a ride from a young man who states he is also heading interstate. But it’s not long until Charlie starts having terrible doubts – is she alone in the car with the killer? Is her life also in danger?

First of all, let me say that I really liked the setting in the 90’s. This type of thriller works better without cell phones and internet on tap, when making a phone call involves having to find a payphone and you need a map to find your way. The claustrophobic setting of being trapped in a car with a person who could be a killer also created the type of tension I am looking for to keep me engaged.

I also enjoyed the format of the story, which rolled out like the scenes in a screenplay. It managed to set the scene well and made the book more of a visual experience, the way movie-buff Charlie would have seen it. In fact, this book definitely works better if you read it as if you were watching the movie. Charlie makes some questionable decisions, but hey – it’s just a movie! That way, some scenes in the book even benefited from the use of well-worn thriller and horror tropes, such as the diner in the middle of nowhere or the old motel, which gave the story a darker, more sinister feel (but would have been slightly corny and over the top if you don’t ride with the movie theme).

Even though I enjoyed the overall experience, I did have a few problems with the story:

*) Charlie’s “movies” in her head – what exactly was this? Hallucinations? Psychosis? PTSD? It made her an unreliable narrator, but in a slightly cheap way that made me feel tricked. I prefer the more subtle doubts whether a character is telling the truth than the “but the previous chapter was just one of her hallucinations” kind.

*) Most of the book is written from Charlie’s POV, but for a few pages here and there we get someone else’s perspective, which was strange. It also didn’t end up fitting in well with the roles those characters played in the end.

*) I would have liked to feel more of a sense of danger from Josh/Jake and the scenes in the car than mild curiosity about his character. I couldn’t stop comparing this book to Paullina Simons’ novel 11 Hours, where the sense of danger and claustrophobia increased dramatically as the journey went on and I feared for the life of the main character at the hands of her abductor.

*) My main gripe with Sager’s portrayal of young women characters is that they all fit into the stereotype of being “not like other girls” and yet somehow lack personality. I didn’t find Charlie all that well developed as a character, i.e. I never really understood her motivations or decision making processes, or her over-the-top guilt for leaving a party early she didn’t want to go to in the first place. But maybe I am a couple of generations too old for this type of story (even though I was in my wee youth in the 90’s and related to other aspects of the era just fine).

The ending was fairly predictable for me, but luckily there was a clever little twist at the end that created a more unique and unusual spin to an otherwise run-of-the-mill type of story.

Summary:

All in all, SURVIVE THE NIGHT is the kind of easy popcorn read you can devour in a single sitting on a plane or on the beach. It is definitely more rewarding if you go with the movie theme and see it roll out in your head like the screenplay it is formatted as – that way Charlie’s “movies in her head” may also make more sense.

Thank you to Netgalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the free electronic copy of this novel and for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.