A century of silence has a way of curdling into legend, and Riley Sager knows exactly how to make that legend walk again. “The Unknown,” his tenth novel, sends a film crew to a remote Vermont island to shoot a movie about the five women who vanished there in 1926 — and then lets the island’s old habits reassert themselves on the people telling its story.
The setup gives Sager a gift he doesn’t waste: two timelines braided around the same patch of rock and pine. In 1926, a circle of women holds séances trying to reach across whatever divide swallowed their friends. A hundred years later, a struggling actress lands a last-minute lead role in the film recreating that story, only to find the production restaging the séances a little too faithfully. Cast and crew start hearing things the script didn’t call for, and the island’s fog stops feeling like weather and starts feeling like intention.
Sager’s real strength here is mood. He builds the island as a character in its own right, patient and faintly amused by the humans currently trespassing on its history, and the dual-timeline structure lets him cut away from a rising scare in one century to a rising scare in the other, which keeps the pages turning even when the plot takes a breath. The séance sequences are the clear highlight, filmed and re-filmed until the line between performance and possession gets satisfyingly blurry. Readers who came to Sager for atmosphere over airtight plotting will find plenty to like: this is a haunted-house novel that happens to be an island, dressed in gothic fog and movie-set artifice.
Critical reception has been divided in a way that’s fairly typical for a prolific thriller writer at book ten. Trade reviewers have generally praised Sager’s craft, noting that he takes well-worn haunted-history tropes and executes them with real confidence, delivering exactly the kind of atmospheric payoff his large readership shows up for. Other critics have been tougher on the mechanics, arguing that the mystery’s resolution doesn’t fully earn the dread Sager spends three hundred pages building, and that a few too many plot threads get left dangling once the fog clears. Genre readers on early-review platforms have mostly split the difference: strong on vibes, shakier on the landing.
That tension is worth knowing going in. If you read Sager for the slow-building dread, the double timeline, and the sense that history is a loop rather than a line, “The Unknown” delivers a genuinely creepy, well-constructed ride. If you need every thread tied off with forensic precision, you may finish it with a few lingering questions of your own — fittingly, for a book about an island that doesn’t like to explain itself.
Verdict: Atmospheric and unsettling even when the plot loosens its grip — a satisfying pick for fans of gothic, dual-timeline horror who prioritize mood over tidy answers.
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