Get this man a picture deal! Seriously. There are too many Riley Sager novels that thrive in the pop culture space, and his most recent novel, The Unknown is no different!
Marin Keane is a woman trying to make it in show business and she finally stumbles upon her big break. After an audition where she manages to sell herself with a convincing, if not maybe a little true, ghost story. The fact that it happens to be about her dead sister never really comes up, but it does land her a lead role in a film by an acclaimed indie director alongside an Oscar-winning legend. It all seems like a dream and that it’s too good to be true. And maybe it is.
In the lead-up to filming, the director, Ronan Peters, requests that all of the main cast spend a week on the island where the inspiration for this film did back in the mid-20s. New Avalon is the place, and honestly if some of the wardrobe hadn’t been discussed, along with the year, my brain somehow wants to put the events of the past in the 70s. Perhaps it’s because the film centers on a group of women who actually lived on this island, reclusive to the rest of the world, and purportedly practicing witchcraft. I imagine that was quite taboo in the 20s.
Marin is playing Daisy, whose diary the whole film is based on. Marin is staying in her old cabin, and wearing period specific clothes, and oh yeah, required to perform a seance. The rest of the women on the island for the most part stick together and seem to be in the same frame of mind, but when it seems the supernatural has come to mess with them, well, sometimes it’s every woman for themselves. When events on New Avalon start playing out almost verbatum to Daisy’s diary, Marin doesn’t know what to believe.
That’s all I’m really willing to divulge as far as the plot goes, but I promise there are juicy twists and turns, along with some unexpected but certainly not unwelcomed plot points that are really timely to today. And as I said initially, this is a story that is practically begging to be brought to a screen, weather small or large. This might have been my most favorite read since Survive the Night!