Review by Booklist Review
Gemma Turner is a film star in the 1960s who is unsuccessfully trying to move her career from one phase to the next. In the midst of this, she does a modeling campaign that is seen by a big-name French director. He thinks she will be perfect for his next movie, which is a twist on a vampire-horror film called L'Etrange Lune. They will be filming in an old hunting lodge--a perfect match for the atmosphere of the film. The second thread of this story follows a young man named Christopher Kent throughout his life. In Christopher's story, Gemma disappeared during the filming of L'Etrange Lune, and he is obsessed with what happened to her. The mystery at the heart of the novel propels the reader through the story at a lightning speed, and it gets more and more interesting as the story goes on. With the atmosphere of horror and some fantastical elements, this multigenre read will speak to a lot of different readers, especially fans of Night Film (2013), by Marisha Pessl.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Sayers (The Ladies of the Secret Circus) returns with a wonderfully creepy tale of ambition, loss, and the lure of an unsolved mystery. From a young age, Christopher Kent learned to take care of both himself and his unstable mother as they moved from motel to motel. Then she has a breakdown that he can neither handle nor conceal, triggered by seeing a photo of Gemma Turner, a Hollywood starlet who disappeared in the 1960s. Before this incident, Christopher had never heard of Gemma, but afterward, he makes researching her his life's work, determined to uncover the connection between Gemma and his mother. This obsession lands him in film school--and, eventually, scores him an elusive invite to a private screening of Gemma's final film, the experimental French horror flick L'Étrange Lune, a movie shrouded in intrigue. Gemma's own timeline is interwoven throughout as filming for L'Étrange Lune goes horrifically awry. Sayers masterfully weaves a tale of multigenerational secrets, creating an enticing dance between past and present that will keep readers on edge. The psychological depth Sayers brings to the core mystery invites comparisons to Gillian Flynn, while the lost horror film at the center of the plot will put readers in mind of Sylvia Moreno-Garcia's Silver Nitrate. Agent: Roz Foster, Frances Goldin Literary. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Obsession and dark magic collide in this labyrinthine blending of horror, fantasy, romance, and a touch of mystery. It's 1968, and at the ripe old age of 22, Gemma Turner, a fading star of American beach movies, finds her career in a shamble. She has one final chance at stardom when she lands a role in L'Étrange Lune, a French Nouvelle Vague horror film directed by arrogant and self-aggrandizing Thierry Valdon. Soon after shooting begins, though, Gemma vanishes from set and finds herself trapped within the world of the film as mysterious and malevolent forces pull the strings. Back in the real world, Gemma's disappearance remains shrouded in mystery, and no one is more haunted by it than Christopher Kent, a Columbia film student in 1997. For more than 20 years, he been searching for reasons for his late mother's apparent hatred of the presumed-dead actress, and now he finds himself one of 75 people invited to attend a rare screening of L'Étrange Lune, with all the pomp and melodramatic circumstance one might expect of a secret society. While the book's concept holds phenomenal potential, the execution drags. The awkward blending of genres may disappoint fans of horror and romance alike as large stretches of the book seem to completely forgo one or the other. The horror elements are never quite unnerving, and the romances suffer from a tell-don't-show approach. Though the payoff connects all the loose strings, making for an entertaining section at last, the intriguing premise is hampered by the book's sheer length and uneven pacing. Sayers has demonstrated the importance of killing one's darlings, as too many of this novel's more than 400 pages would have been better off left on the cutting-room floor. An intriguing, if scattershot, novel that would have benefited from substantial tightening. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
