Happy ending continues for Riley Sager
“Something I’m the most proud of is that I took those lemons and I made lemonade.”
— Riley Sager, on his career struggles
College student Charlie Jordan is in quite a predicament. She’s on a late-night drive in a slate gray Pontiac Grand Am driven by Josh Baxter, a man she’d only briefly met at a message board on campus in New Jersey. She was desperate for a ride back home to Ohio, and this smooth-talking stranger conveniently swooped in to save the day.
But is he capable of murder? Author Riley Sager’s latest psychological thriller, “Survive the Night” (Dutton, $27), tells the story of Charlie, a film studies major and movie buff who studied cinema as a way to deal with childhood trauma. When an incident occurs on campus, it sends her brain spiraling back into classic films to the point where she has trouble figuring out what’s real and what’s a movie playing in her head.
“I knew from the get-go Charlie was going to be a film studies major — because that’s what I was in the ’90s,” Sager said during a recent phone interview. Sager is the pseudonym of former journalist and graphic designer Todd Ritter, who rose to popularity as Sager in 2017 with his award-winning bestseller, “Final Girls.”
“I wanted to have a lot of movie references, because it’s fun and readers like that. But one of the problems,” he says, “was how was I going to keep her in this car for such a long period of time and not have readers be, like, ‘Just jump out of the car, you idiot!’ ”
Sager dealt with this by writing that Charlie’s trauma affects how her brain works, so she has trouble distinguishing between fact and fiction. “It was a fun way to play with what was happening and guessing what’s real and what’s a movie.”
Sager graduated from Penn State University and currently resides in New Jersey. Like his protagonist, Sager lists favorite films such as “Jaws,” “Rear Window,” “The Silence of the Lambs” and a movie he pokes fun at in the book, “The Sound of Music.”
“There’s a little joke in the book about that,” he said with a laugh, noting that Charlie warns Josh to “stay away” from people who list the Julie Andrews classic as one of their favorite films. “Right, I would be one of those people that Charlie would be, like, ‘You’re not worth talking to.’ ”
He also cleverly uses music to further the plot. The story takes place in 1991, the year Nirvana’s “Nevermind” dominated MTV and radio. On top of including Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” he references “Kiss Them For Me” by Siouxsie and the Banshees and “Just Like Heaven” from the Cure, both of which play a significant role in the book.
“I thought the songs would have extra meaning and give a certain mood,” he said, adding that he was a senior in high school when “Nevermind” was released. “Yes, Nirvana was a given because I blasted that on my tape deck.”
Sager likes writing about strong female leads, focusing on their will to survive, fight and persevere. In “Survive the Night,” he sees Charlie turn from a supporting character in her own life to its protagonist as she struggles to put the correct scenes together in her mind. Sager said his editor refers to this type of metamorphosis as “mic drop moments,” and that’s something he likes to include in his books.
He knows firsthand what it’s like to be at the bottom and come out triumphant. With 15 years in reporting and editing under his belt, Sager was laid off from the New Jersey Star-Ledger five years ago. With so many losing their day jobs and careers during the COVID-19 pandemic, Sager offers a bit of hope. Where one journey ends, another can begin.
“It was really hard,” he said. “Desperation can be a really great motivator, though. That’s how I felt at the time. I had published a few books under my real name and they did nothing, then I was laid off and I literally couldn’t find another job. I was applying to be a writer at like, a pet food trade magazine and I could not get a job. I was so angry and frustrated, but I had this idea for a book. My agent loved it and I just wasn’t going to rest until I got it done and then just see what happened. I just got lucky that ‘Final Girls’ did really blow up.”
Sager has gone on to publish more books, including 2018’s “The Last Time I Lied,” and two more, “Lock Every Door” and “Home Before Dark,” during the lockdown last year. He continued to find inspiration and write during quarantine while taking mental breaks to tend to his garden and to sweat it out on the elliptical in his basement while listening to Taylor Swift’s “Folklore” and “Evermore” albums.
If “Final Girls” hadn’t become a success, Sager said, he was going to quit writing for good.
“I was going to go back to school and just become a librarian,” he said. “But something I’m the most proud of is that I took those lemons and I made lemonade.”