Survive the Night by Riley Sager follows college student Charlie, who, having a hard time dealing with her roommate’s murder, decides to go home for break with no plans to return to campus. She accepts a ride from someone she meets at the college rideboard, and this is when our adventure begins. Charlie decides if anything seeming out of the ordinary happens, she will immediately back out of the ride. But from the get go, Charlie doesn’t follow her instincts. She convinces herself that she’s just being paranoid. Her roommate’s murderer, who had killed two women previously, was still on the loose, after all.
The pacing of this book was spectacular. As the timeline suggests, the book spans a single night, and Charlie and Josh getting to know each other coupled with car games and 90s music made it a lot of fun to read. But fun for the reader quickly turns to suspicion as Josh reveals more of himself to Charlie. I will say that I found this read to be gripping and exciting. I never wanted to stop listening. Charlie was a very aloof character and hard to get to know, but the many losses in her life did endear her to me. And I wanted what she wanted - to just get home to her grandmother. As for Josh, he was a character I found myself liking in spite of myself. In fact, I felt about him much like I felt about Joe Goldberg from YOU by Caroline Kepnes. I knew it was wrong, but I just couldn’t help myself. And those kinds of characters make for one heck of a read!
I will say there were a few disconnects in this book for me - the message of girl power fell flat in the face of stupid decisions for one, and for another, with the amount of gaslighting that went on in this book, I found elements of the end to be unbelievable.
However, even with those things, I think this story is worth the read. The excitement won me over, and I can definitely see myself rereading Survive the Night.
Audiobook Narration: I really liked Savannah Gilmore’s narration for this story. I thought she captured Charlie’s ambivalence perfectly, and I also enjoyed her men’s voices. I thought she did a good job amping up her tone when exciting things were happening, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend her to listeners. I’m excited to hear more from this narrator!
It’s November 1991. George H. W. Bush is in the White House, Nirvana's in the tape deck, and movie-obsessed college student Charlie Jordan is in a car with a man who might be a serial killer.
Josh Baxter, the man behind the wheel, is a virtual stranger to Charlie. They met at the campus ride board, each looking to share the long drive home to Ohio. Both have good reasons for wanting to get away. For Charlie, it’s guilt and grief over the murder of her best friend, who became the third victim of the man known as the Campus Killer. For Josh, it’s to help care for his sick father. Or so he says. Like the Hitchcock heroine she’s named after, Charlie has her doubts. There’s something suspicious about Josh, from the holes in his story about his father to how he doesn’t seem to want Charlie to see inside the car’s trunk. As they travel an empty highway in the dead of night, an increasingly worried Charlie begins to think she’s sharing a car with the Campus Killer. Is Josh truly dangerous? Or is Charlie’s suspicion merely a figment of her movie-fueled imagination?
What follows is a game of cat and mouse played out on night-shrouded roads and in neon-lit parking lots, during an age when the only call for help can be made on a pay phone and in a place where there's nowhere to run. In order to win, Charlie must do one thing—survive the night.
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