Flashout A novel

New York Times culture reporter Soloski (Here in the Dark) delivers a heady, atmospheric thriller that underscores the dark side of art-making. Allison Morales arrives in New York City in 1972 "so hungry for experience that some days I could taste it like blood in the back of my throat." She falls in with Theater Negative, a cultlike group of avant-garde performers living in squalor and clinging to their '60s heyday. She's utterly seduced, both by the group's intoxicating notions of personal freedom and by their leader, Peter, who cycles through the young women who drift into Theater Negative's orbit. After Allison is expelled from school, she joins the group on a hastily assembled European tour that quickly turns disastrous when an attempt at a pornographic film shoot leads to sexual assault and murder. Soloski braids together the '70s timeline with one set 25 years later, when Allison is teaching theater in L.A. and reckoning with her days in Theater Negative. Eventually, she decides to seek out the group's surviving members. The tone is pitch-black throughout, with the older Allison frankly assessing the harm she's inflicted in response to the harm she suffered, but Soloski's darkly seductive prose wrings harsh beauty from the characters' pain. The results are grimly satisfying. Agent: Sarah Burnes, Gernert Co. (Aug.)

A drama teacher's mysterious past comes back to haunt her. In 1972, New York college student Allison Hayes attends an eccentric performance by Theater Negative, an avant-garde troupe that pushes the boundaries of what's considered art. She's immediately mesmerized and finds herself regularly sneaking out of her dorm to go to the group's meetings, eventually becoming a member under the name Alice Haze when the leader mishears her name. In 1997, Allison is an English and drama teacher at a rich high school in Los Angeles, making enough to take care of her mother and get by. When the school institutes a new method of communicating with parents--email--Allison starts getting anonymous messages from someone who insinuates that they know her from her Theater Negative days, and that they know what she did "that night." Now Allison must discover who from her past is still around, and still alive, before her old life destroys her new one. Soloski drives the narrative forward by switching almost every chapter between the past and the present, so the reader gradually discovers what happened in 1972 while Allison continues her search for Theater Negative members. Both storylines drop tantalizing hints while pushing forward to their respective climaxes. Although a woman at risk of exposure from her mysterious past might not be the newest idea, the story of Theater Negative--from the strange, cultlike nature of its members to its peculiar performances--is at once completely original and heartbreakingly familiar. The dramatic irony of watching young Allison head into danger from a distance of 20 years later is a gut punch. The pacing hits just right as both revelations--what happened "that night" and the identity of the emailer--wash over the reader. An intriguing mystery of youth, folly, and theater. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.