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.
Now that’s a lede.
I gave Survive the Night 4 stars purely for the mindfuck twists. It’s a ride, to be sure, but it’s not quite the electrifying novel it could have, and should have been.
Sager is a must-read author for me – anything he puts out, I’ll snap up (or nab on NetGalley before my finger even knows I’m smashing the Request button) – I loved Final Girls and Lock Every Door so very much. The way that Sager turns tropes on their head is like a drug to a thriller addict like me – his writing is fresh and surprising, often funny and smart. There is a lot to like about Survive the Night, but there are a few key things that I think would have made this even better.
Like the blurb says, our heroine Charlie is a young woman living in the 1990s, taking a road trip with a man she suspects might be the serial killer who murdered her best friend. Unable to cope with the death of Maddy, Charlie is heading home, leaving her boyfriend behind on campus and hoping that she’ll heal with the help of her grandmother and their beloved movies. Charlie is a film buff and uses their familiarity to escape from the tragedies that have befallen her at such a young age.
Her ride, Josh, seems great at first. Handsome and self assured, he’s an easy conversationalist and good company on the emptiness of the midnight roads. But soon, Charlie starts to wonder – why is his story changing so often? Why won’t he let her see what’s in the trunk of his car? Why is he sticking so close, seemingly unwilling to let her leave his side?
Is he the Campus Killer?
And if so, can she kill him before he kills her?
What follows is pretty juicy, up till the end, when everything falls apart a bit. There are some excellent twists throughout this page turner – some I saw coming and others I very much didn’t.
The issue isn’t with the plot so much – it’s with the atmosphere. I wanted so much more of the 90s setting and vibes. The 1990s is the decade in which I became a teenager, and I remember it fondly. The mall, the lack of cellphones, not even a whisper of an Apple Watch or iPad, the clothes and trends, the celebrities (Leo DiCaprio heeeeey), movies, music… it’s such a rich decade because it really was the cusp of a new age in the way human beings interact. There was no social media or even messenger / DM – people had to use pay phones when they were out and at night, you talked endlessly on the phone to your friends until your parents shouted at you to stop taking up the line.
I felt that Sager could have utilized this more – although there are plenty of Nirvana mentions and pay phones abound, it just didn’t feel like the 90s as much, I’m not sure why.
There’s also a gimmick used throughout the novel that weakened it, in my humble opinion. Especially in the epilogue, when the gimmick reveals itself in an extremely meta way that affected how I looked at the novel in its entirety.
However, these really are small quibbles. Survive the Night is a banger of a thriller. It’s a testament to Sager’s talent that I expect so much from his books and that there were tons of twists I never in a million years saw coming. Like a 90s trend, Sager’s writing is just that irresistible.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
doves falling 