Survive The Night is a psychological mind fuck wrapped inside a horror flick. It twists your brain in knots, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy while you alternate between gasping “holy shit” and yelling “run away!” Riley Sager has outdone himself with this one. I devoured it in no time. Unable to put it down, I lost sleep due to a relentless need to uncover what happens next. No regrets. It’s fantastic!
Charlie Jordan is hitching a ride from her college in New Jersey to her home in Ohio. An hour into the six hour drive she starts to believe that the man driving the car, a stranger she met at the ride share board on campus, is the serial killer responsible for murdering Charlie’s roommate and best friend. However, Charlie has a unique quirk of taking real life events and enhancing them in her brain as if they are movies on the silver screen. This is her unique way of coping with stress and trauma, stemming from watching movies with her grandma in the immediate aftermath of her parent’s death via automobile accident. So…is this man really a cold-blooded killer about to strike or is he innocently giving her a ride on his way to care for his ill father and Charlie’s overactive imagination is getting the best of her? What ensues is a high-stakes chess match in which Charlie has one simple, primal goal – Survive The Night.
It’s an understatement to say Survive The Night keeps you guessing from start to finish. Charlie’s brilliant character trait of seeing movies in her mind along with the diabolically manipulative nature of her ride share driver combine to eliminate the possibility of predicting the outcome with any level of certainty. In fact, anytime you think you have it figured out, a big twist smacks you upside the head and you find out in no uncertain terms that you have no clue how the story is going to end. And it stays that way up until the last paragraph. It’s truly messed up…in a good way.
I can’t say enough good things about this book. The pacing is warp speed, the characters are unique, the twists are blindsiding, the plot is horrifying, the suspense anxiety inducing, and choosing 1991 as the time period is perfect to eliminate technology that would change the essence of the story. Riley Sager knocked it out of the park with Survive The Night. I absolutely loved it and wholeheartedly recommend it to psychological/horror thriller fans or anyone who likes to be kept in breathless, nervous suspense for a few hours.
Follow Steve on Twitter or contact him via the site.
Purchase Survive The Night
(Note: most indie bookstores can fulfill an order as quickly as larger retailers. Please consider contacting them for your next purchase.)
Barrington Books
Chapter 2 Books
Murder By The Book
Once Upon A Crime
The Book Dragon
The Poisoned Pen
