TL; W[on’t]R[read the review]: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. God. This was not good.
Summary [courtesy of Goodreads]: 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?
Ok, so obviously I’ve “enjoyed” some Riley Sager in the past. They’re problematic AF, like most cis, white-authored thrillers, but they had solid, silly junk-food plots and twists. So I figured his new book would be more of the same (although the new cover style suggested otherwise–I should’ve been paying attention). I was…wrong. We still get a white lady in peril thanks to a series of her own and other people’s ill-advised decisions, but the white lady in question here was, somehow, unfathomably, EVEN MORE CLUELESS AND UNAWARE than earlier iterations. HOW??!?!?!
Sager’s writing style still goes down easy, like a bag of chips, but the choice to set everything in the span of one night (along with some predictably lengthy flashbacks) REALLY made for some painfully long-winded descriptions of scenery, padded and circular interior monologues, and neverending debates about whether heroine Charlie should cut and run from a moving vehicle. And that’s just the first third of the book…
At some point, I realized I wasn’t having fun, and I began to suspect I’d guessed one of the main twists, so I hopped on Goodreads, spoiled myself, and decided to DNF this thing. (Minor spoiler: my guess was RIGHT, because it was telegraphed so, so blatantly and was so, so ridiculous.)
SPOILER TERRITORY
So, of course, driver Josh is not the campus killer. I can’t think of a modern bestselling thriller that can get away with a ‘the twist is there TRULY is no twist’ move in this day and age. Nope. Not happening.
Josh is bad (of course), but in a fraught way that I guessed because the narrative spent way too much energy casually mentioning Charlie’s dead roommate’s weird family, particularly her grandmother, who just happens to live in a weird out-of-the-way town they’re driving through. Turns out, Josh was hired by dead roommate’s grandma to kidnap Charlie so she could find out the truth about her granddaughter’s murder, in the hopes that a quick spot of interrogation/ torture would jumpstart Charlie’s glitchy memory. Or something like that. Only Josh feels BAD about it, and his name’s not really Josh (it’s Jake), and he has to help Charlie escape everything when…get this even bigger twist….it turns out the REAL campus killer who murdered Charlie’s roommate along with a slew of other women was Charlie’s older, grad-student boyfriend Robbie all along [gasp!!]. (Random useful lesson: Don’t date grad students when you’re a freshman, y’all!!) And now HE’s shown up at the derelict hotel that dead roommate’s grandma has taken Charlie to. It’s…typically Sager, in that it’s a hot mess of bananapants nonsense.
But it was learning about the epilogue that truly did me in and earned Tib’s cranky ire. Turns out, this whole novel is a FILM TREATMENT for the cinematic adaptation of Charlie’s harrowing night. (Let’s leave aside the fact that film treatments aren’t novel-length, nor do they just use “int. Car” or “11:59 PM” as the sole evidence of being film treatments, because we have bigger issues to discuss.) But what truly got me was the fact that Charlie is dealing with the fallout from and theatrical release of her near-death experience in the company of JOSH/JAKE himself, whom she has goddamn MARRIED?!?!??!?! And it’s not played (afaik, obviously–I’m going off of Goodreads here) as a twisted, Stockholm-Syndrome’d ending à la the book version of Hannibal, either. It’s her happily ever after.
Fucking WHAT??