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The Unknown: What Happens When a Mystery Explains Too Much · The Book Brief Project

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  Speaker 1: Almost everything written about The Unknown, the tenth novel by
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  Speaker 1: Riley Sager, is about its final hundred pages. Whether the
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  Speaker 1: twists land, and whether there are simply too many of them,
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  Speaker 1: is the argument readers and critics have been having since August.
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  Speaker 1: Almost nobody has mentioned the week in the middle of
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  Speaker 1: the book when a group of actresses agree to live
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  Speaker 1: as if they were already dead, and that week is
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  Speaker 1: where the novel does its real thinking. It helps to
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  Speaker 1: notice what kind of book this is supposed to be.
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  Speaker 1: It carries a title that promises a mystery, and it
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  Speaker 1: sits on a shelf where mysteries are expected to be solved,
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  Speaker 1: preferably with the floor dropping out from under the reader
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  Speaker 1: in the last act. So the question worth carrying through
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  Speaker 1: it is a simple one. Can a novel called The
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  Speaker 1: Unknown afford to leave anything unknown when the genre it
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  Speaker 1: belongs to is practically under contract to explain everything? Riley
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  Speaker 1: Sager is a name more than a person. Todd Ritter
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  Speaker 1: published three mysteries under his own name first, and the
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  Speaker 1: new name arrived with a new kind of book. Thrillers
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  Speaker 1: narrated by women, sold under a byline that told you
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  Speaker 1: nothing about who wrote them. Ten novels later, that byline
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  Speaker 1: has become a promise. Sager knew this would be the tenth,
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  Speaker 1: and he has said he pitched it to his editor
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  Speaker 1: as a greatest hits tour of his own career. with
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  Speaker 1: pieces of every earlier book assembled into something new. He wanted,
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  Speaker 1: in his words, to write the quintessential Riley Sager book.
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  Speaker 1: That detail matters more than it looks. A novel about
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  Speaker 1: women hired to play a role was written by a
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  Speaker 1: man deliberately playing the author his readers expect. Here is
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  Speaker 1: the setup. In 1926, on an island in a Vermont lake,
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  Speaker 1: a commune of spiritual mediums vanished. The island is called
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  Speaker 1: New Avalon, and one of the missing women owned it outright.
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  Speaker 1: Nobody found bodies. What people found were five dresses hanging
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  Speaker 1: from the branches of an old oak, one for each woman.
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  Speaker 1: Some locals think they simply left. Others think they were killed.
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  Speaker 1: The version that stuck comes from a diary left behind
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  Speaker 1: by one of them, a young woman named Daisy Rue,
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  Speaker 1: who wrote about a seance that went wrong. in something
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  Speaker 1: that took the women one by one. A century later,
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  Speaker 1: Marin is waiting tables between auditions for commercials and small
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  Speaker 1: plays nobody sees. Out of nowhere, she gets a face-to-face
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  Speaker 1: audition with the most wanted young director in Hollywood. And then, improbably,
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  Speaker 1: the part. She will play Daisy, the lead, opposite a
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  Speaker 1: screen legend she grew up worshiping. The catch comes with
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  Speaker 1: the contract. Before a single scene is shot, The director
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  Speaker 1: wants his cast to spend a week on New Avalon itself,
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  Speaker 1: with no electricity and nothing that did not exist in 1926,
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  Speaker 1: phones included. Period close, and after sundown, period dark. Think
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  Speaker 1: about what the director is really asking for. He calls
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  Speaker 1: it immersion. What it amounts to is rehearsing a disappearance
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  Speaker 1: by living inside it, sleeping where the vanished women slept,
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  Speaker 1: and wearing what they wore, until the distance between playing
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  Speaker 1: a missing woman and becoming one gets very thin. Sager
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  Speaker 1: does not need a ghost to make that frightening. The
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  Speaker 1: request is frightening by itself, because the women agree, and
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  Speaker 1: they agree for the reason people in that business usually do.
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  Speaker 1: Someone powerful asked, and the job was the job? Sager
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  Speaker 1: has described Marin's first decision in exactly those terms. She
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  Speaker 1: knows the trip is a bad idea, and she goes
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  Speaker 1: anyway because of what it might do for her career.
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  Speaker 1: It is the most honest motive in the book, and
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  Speaker 1: nothing supernatural is required to explain it. He places the
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  Speaker 1: island about two miles from shore, close enough that at
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  Speaker 1: night the women can see the lights of the mainland,
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  Speaker 1: and far enough that the lights do them no good.
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  Speaker 1: It is a small decision. and it shows he understands
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  Speaker 1: dread better than his reputation for twists suggests. The worst
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  Speaker 1: trap is the one with the exit in plain view.
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  Speaker 1: So when a sudden medical emergency cuts the group off,
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  Speaker 1: and people start going missing the way they did a
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  Speaker 1: hundred years earlier, the lights are still there across the water,
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  Speaker 1: doing nothing. There is one more detail about the island
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  Speaker 1: that the book lets sit quietly. The grand house on
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  Speaker 1: New Avalon was built with money from an arms manufacturer.
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  Speaker 1: A fortune made on the dead of one era paid
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  Speaker 1: for the rooms where women tried to speak to the
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  Speaker 1: dead of another. Sager never underlines it, and he is
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  Speaker 1: right not to. The seances are where the novel becomes
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  Speaker 1: genuinely strange. There is one in 1926, inside Daisy's diary,
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  Speaker 1: and one a century later, staged by the cast. Both
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  Speaker 1: open the same way, with someone at a candlelit table
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  Speaker 1: asking whether there is a spirit present. In the modern version,
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  Speaker 1: the actors end up arguing over whether the planchette actually
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  Speaker 1: moved or whether somebody pushed it. That argument is the
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  Speaker 1: book in miniature. Nobody at that table can tell a
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  Speaker 1: performance from a haunting, And for a long stretch, the
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  Speaker 1: novel lets you suspect there may be no difference to find.
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  Speaker 1: Sager knows the history under this. Spiritualism, as he has
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  Speaker 1: pointed out, came back in waves after catastrophes, after the
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  Speaker 1: Civil War, and again after the First World War and
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  Speaker 1: the flu that followed it. People who had lost everyone
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  Speaker 1: paid mediums to put the dead back in the room
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  Speaker 1: for an hour. In 1926... The year the women of
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  Speaker 1: New Avalon vanish is also the year Houdini testified before Congress,
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  Speaker 1: showing lawmakers how mediums produce their effects. His whole case
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  Speaker 1: was that these women were performers. Which means the novel
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  Speaker 1: has lined up two professions and let them touch. A
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  Speaker 1: medium in 1926 and an actress in 2026 are doing
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  Speaker 1: versions of the same work. Each one lends her body
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  Speaker 1: and her voice to a dead woman. in front of
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  Speaker 1: people who badly want the effect to be real. Marin
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  Speaker 1: is cast as Daisy, and Daisy in her diary is
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  Speaker 1: performing too, for the spirits and for whoever would read
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  Speaker 1: her later. Sager has said he wanted Daisy to hold
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  Speaker 1: things back while seeming to hold nothing back. That is
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  Speaker 1: a fair description of a good medium. It is also
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  Speaker 1: a fair description of a good actress and of a
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  Speaker 1: good thriller writer. So, by the middle, the book has
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  Speaker 1: built something rare on its shelf. It is a horror
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  Speaker 1: novel in which the most frightening thing is how willingly
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  Speaker 1: people perform for power in a mystery whose central evidence
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  Speaker 1: was written by a performer. What it has not done
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  Speaker 1: yet is decide what actually happened on that island. There
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  Speaker 1: is a detail Sager gave in an interview that explains
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  Speaker 1: a great deal. He wrote roughly the first hundred pages
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  Speaker 1: without knowing what was going on. He did not know
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  Speaker 1: who took the women or why. Then he had to
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  Speaker 1: stop writing for a week or two and work it
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  Speaker 1: out because his books are built backward from the twist.
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  Speaker 1: And this one did not have a twist yet. Those
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  Speaker 1: first hundred pages are the best thing in the novel.
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  Speaker 1: And they were written by a man who, like his characters,
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  Speaker 1: was sitting at the table in the dark, waiting to
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  Speaker 1: see what would move. Once the answer exists, the book
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  Speaker 1: starts serving it. The last stretch, as even sympathetic critics noticed,
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  Speaker 1: turns into long passages of characters explaining things to one another.
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  Speaker 1: Secret stacked on secret. Each revision of the past arriving
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  Speaker 1: on schedule. One reviewer admitted that some of the reveals
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  Speaker 1: came by coincidence. I will not tell you what those
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  Speaker 1: secrets are. The problem is not any single one of them.
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  Speaker 1: The problem is what explanation does to a book with
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  Speaker 1: this title. The cost shows most in Marin. Sager has
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  Speaker 1: said the title has a second meaning, Marin herself, an
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  Speaker 1: actress nobody has heard of, who does not know who
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  Speaker 1: she is when she steps onto the island and does
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  Speaker 1: by the time she leaves. That is a real arc,
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  Speaker 1: and it is the emotional reason to read the book.
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  Speaker 1: But a woman discovering who she is needs room, and
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  Speaker 1: the final stretch hands most of its room to the
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  Speaker 1: plot discovering who everyone else was. Even a review that
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  Speaker 1: loved the atmosphere called the finale chaotic. The revelations arrive
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  Speaker 1: faster than anyone has time to feel them, Marin included.
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  Speaker 1: A haunting, like a seance, only works while it is undecided.
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  Speaker 1: The moment you learn who was pushing the planchette, the
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  Speaker 1: table is just a table. Sager's genre requires him to
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  Speaker 1: tell you who was pushing, and by now so does
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  Speaker 1: his own name. He tells you thoroughly, and something goes
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  Speaker 1: out of the room. He has said that while he writes,
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  Speaker 1: he imagines the trailer for the book, music, and shots included.
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  Speaker 1: It is a charming habit, and it explains more than
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  Speaker 1: he may intend. A trailer is made of reveals. It promises,
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  Speaker 1: in two minutes, that everything will be shown, and the
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  Speaker 1: unknown keeps that promise to the letter. What makes this
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  Speaker 1: frustrating is that Sager plainly knows the other kind of fear.
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  Speaker 1: The five dresses came from a photograph he stumbled on
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  Speaker 1: online more than 20 years ago, before he was really
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  Speaker 1: a writer. White dresses hanging from a tree in the
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  Speaker 1: middle of a swamp, with no explanation anywhere. He never
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  Speaker 1: learned who put them there. he has never even found
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  Speaker 1: the site again. That image stayed with him for two
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  Speaker 1: decades for one reason, which is that nobody ever explained it.
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  Speaker 1: His novel is the explanation. There is a book that
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  Speaker 1: made the opposite choice. In 1967, Joan Lindsay published Picnic
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  Speaker 1: at Hanging Rock about schoolgirls who vanished during an outing,
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  Speaker 1: and she refused to explain what happened to them. She
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  Speaker 1: had written a final chapter with an answer, and she
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  Speaker 1: cut it. It was published only after her death. The
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  Speaker 1: novel is still read and argued over, and a large
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  Speaker 1: part of the reason is that the gap stayed open.
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  Speaker 1: Sager has borrowed from that story before, and one critic
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  Speaker 1: called this premise an American version of it. What he
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  Speaker 1: has never borrowed is the refusal. It would be easy
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  Speaker 1: to call that a failure of nerve, and I'm not
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  Speaker 1: sure it belongs to him alone. For years, Sager has
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  Speaker 1: been sold as a master of the twist, and his
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  Speaker 1: readers open each book waiting for the floor to drop.
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  Speaker 1: He has said that the rot of Hollywood follows his
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  Speaker 1: characters all the way to Vermont. The same thing happened
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  Speaker 1: to him. The market followed the writer onto the island,
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  Speaker 1: and it asked for what it always asks for. In
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  Speaker 1: that light, he stands exactly where Marin stands, cast in
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  Speaker 1: a role that asks him to be precisely what the
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  Speaker 1: audience already believes he is. He says yes for the
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  Speaker 1: same reason she does. The job is the job. None
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  Speaker 1: of that makes the first half smaller. The week of immersion,
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  Speaker 1: the lights across the water, the argument over the planchette,
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  Speaker 1: the diary that performs its own honesty. Together, they show
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  Speaker 1: a writer thinking hard about what it means to impersonate
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  Speaker 1: the dead for money, inside a genre that rarely gets
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  Speaker 1: credit for thinking at all. The book deserves more serious
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  Speaker 1: attention than its reputation as a summer page turner allows.
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  Speaker 1: It just deserves it for the pages its own ending undoes.
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  Speaker 1: If you like spending this long with a single book,
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  Speaker 1: read closely and argued with, Follow the book brief project.
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  Speaker 1: Another one is already open on the desk. So the
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  Speaker 1: answer to the question is no. A novel called The
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  Speaker 1: Unknown cannot afford to leave anything unknown. And this one
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  Speaker 1: does not try. The last hundred pages are what people
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  Speaker 1: will keep arguing about. The first hundred are the ones
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  Speaker 1: worth remembering because they were written before anyone, the author included,
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  Speaker 1: knew how it ended. Sager can build the unknown as
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  Speaker 1: well as anyone in his genre. What he cannot do
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  Speaker 1: is leave it there.