THE STAR AND THE STRANGE MOON

Obsession and dark magic collide in this labyrinthine blending of horror, fantasy, romance, and a touch of mystery.

It's 1968, and at the ripe old age of 22, Gemma Turner, a fading star of American beach movies, finds her career in a shamble. She has one final chance at stardom when she lands a role in L’Étrange Lune, a French Nouvelle Vague horror film directed by arrogant and self-aggrandizing Thierry Valdon. Soon after shooting begins, though, Gemma vanishes from set and finds herself trapped within the world of the film as mysterious and malevolent forces pull the strings. Back in the real world, Gemma’s disappearance remains shrouded in mystery, and no one is more haunted by it than Christopher Kent, a Columbia film student in 1997. For more than 20 years, he been searching for reasons for his late mother's apparent hatred of the presumed-dead actress, and now he finds himself one of 75 people invited to attend a rare screening of L’Étrange Lune, with all the pomp and melodramatic circumstance one might expect of a secret society. While the book’s concept holds phenomenal potential, the execution drags. The awkward blending of genres may disappoint fans of horror and romance alike as large stretches of the book seem to completely forgo one or the other. The horror elements are never quite unnerving, and the romances suffer from a tell-don’t-show approach. Though the payoff connects all the loose strings, making for an entertaining section at last, the intriguing premise is hampered by the book's sheer length and uneven pacing. Sayers has demonstrated the importance of killing one’s darlings, as too many of this novel’s more than 400 pages would have been better off left on the cutting-room floor.

An intriguing, if scattershot, novel that would have benefited from substantial tightening.