Reviews with content warning for Terminal illness - Survive the Night

Reviews tagging 'Terminal illness'

Survive the Night by Riley Sager

46 reviews

minimicropup's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional funny mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Tragic, distressing, suspicious

We follow a University student looking for a rideshare so they can return to their childhood home after their roommate was brutally murdered. They are struggling with the losses and stresses in their life and it affects the decisions they make and how they interpret events.

Set in Autumn 1991 on the route from New Jersey to Ohio, USA

Growls, Howls, and Tail Wags 🐺🐕:

🔇 Switched from audio to digital. The narrator and writing style didn't pair well for me. It made everything seem campy and cheesy, and took away from the suspense. That wasn't a problem when I read the text, just when listening. I'm not sure why - narrator wasn't bad, maybe just not nuanced enough?
Charlie makes some ridiculous choices during the plot. When she's clearly in danger she doesn't try to escape, but when she's not in any obvious danger she's ready to hurl herself out of a moving vehicle. As her character develops we come to understand the reasons for her behaviour and rationale, but there are moments that still felt contrived, particularly as we near the end and get the tea about what is really going on.
The ending seemed very cringe, BUT it isn't all that it seems. Can't explain without giving up some spoilers! I thought it was clever, but I could see it being more on the trickster side for some. I think it was justifiable, not lazy - it made me feel differently about the MC and plot.

Cred Rating 🤔: Plausible + Justifiable OTT campiness

Mood Reading Match Up:

Touch of '90's teen thriller movie vibes
Suspenseful slasher turned cat-and-mouse action adventure plot
Stories with classic Hollywood and cinephile themes
Character-driven mysteries with unreliable narrators and serial killers

Content Heads-Up: Fire. Vehicle accident (fatalities). Terminal illness (on page). Gun Violence. Kidnapping and confinement. Mental illness (dissociative, hallucinatory, psychosis)

Format: Library Digital via Libby

Content Warnings

jj_tj's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

Content Warnings

fraise's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Content Warnings

laurenvoice's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Survive the Night was a tense and thrilling read with plenty of twists and turns!

The leading characters in Survive the Night were well-rounded, and you could feel their emotions through the words on the pages. Charlie's character development was phenomenal, although she should have trusted her gut instincts more. And Josh’s character was interesting; the web of lies he spun and that killer vibe he had was a nice touch; it made some of the twists and turns this story took more surprising.

Marge’s character introduction was a surprise, I thought she would slow the story down a bit, but no, she added more depth to Maddy. And she helped not only Charlie’s character development but the story's development too. Thanks to the detour to the Skyline Grille, we saw some great twists within the story and some tense scenes for Charlie and Josh.

It would have been great to get an insight into Maddy's and Robbie's characters without Charlie’s rose-tinted glasses, although the end hinted that they were different to how Charlie described and saw them. However, Charlie being an unreliable narrator made Survive the Night fun, as it was impossible to predict what was coming next!

The end chapter was proof that we should not trust the whole story. Charlie reveals that this was a movie based on her real life, but the director embellished the story for a more dramatic effect. The nineties setting was fun, and the repeated plays of the song Come as You Are were a nice touch. However, what made Survive the Night stand out was that Sager wrote it like a movie.

However, if I had to nitpick, it would be how Josh gaslighting and manipulating Charlie was forgiven too quickly and never addressed properly between both characters. Also, I found the final showdown and revelation of the Campus Killer seemed rather rushed when considering how well-paced some of the other events in the book were.

Survive the Night is the second book I have read by Riley Sager, the first being Final Girls, and I am shocked by the number of dislikes his books have gotten because the two books I have read have hooked me. I have been putting off reading most of his because of the negative reviews, but I am glad Survive the Night premise looked too good to miss, as it was an incredible journey filled with movie magic!

Content Warnings

cady_sass's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Riley Sager has a knack for writing a novel that you think is mediocre for the first half and then changing your mind in the last act. This book is widely accepted to be the “worst” of his thrillers but I was pleasantly surprised! I understand that people take issue with the protagonist being dumb and making horrible decisions, but I think the issue is more that people don’t enjoy an unreliable narrator who’s also self aware. She’s making decisions based on the fact that she doesn’t believe her own mind, and thats where things get dicey. Of course she’s going to do things that seem dumb to you, when, as the reader, you slowly grow to have more information than the protagonist (but… not really). It seems frustratingly obvious what she should be doing, but, as with much of Sager’s work, nothing is what it seems. My biggest critique is a massive spoiler, so read below at your own risk.
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My main issue here (aside from the fact that we have yet another iteration of boyfriend/love interest is the villain) is that there are only 4 characters in this book, if you leave out Maddy and the cop. So, by the end, there’s realistically only two ways you can swing the plot: boyfriend is the serial killer, or the serial killer is unknown. Once you get to a certain point it becomes clear we aren’t going with an ambiguous ending, and therefore it can’t possibly be a surprise anymore who the killer is because the boyfriend is the ONLY option. So is it even a twist? There’s no other character in the book!!! Maybe the final twist with Robbie did it for some people, but for me I would’ve preferred a not-so-tidy ending. Using the boyfriend as the villain is just sooooooo…. Boring? Unoriginal? Obvious? Some combination of all of that.
That said, what he did here with the OTHER 3 characters was nothing short of masterful.

Content Warnings

blouviere4's review against another edition

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mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

sarahmae531's review against another edition

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challenging mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I predicted how this book was going to end. Which usually would be a bad thing. But the twists and turns it takes you on before you get to the end were wild. It had me doubting what I originally thought. There were parts of the book that had my mouth hanging open for minutes as the story unfolded.
This was my first Riley Sager book, and it definitely won’t be my last!

Content Warnings

clevelandbookgirl's review against another edition

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dark tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

carlaah1984's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

First book I've listened to in a while where I started a document just to keep my notes for a review. I'm not sure what it says about me that I keep picking up books where a central theme is

a college roommate has been murdered

especially since I started a career in high education this fall. It's also that all of these

slain roommates have been enigmatic, larger than life, and beloved by their roommates In my Dreams I'm holding a knife and the Maidens.

I was young in the early 1990's so it was fun to have this book set in this time period, and then me questioning some of the things if that was around then, like *69 wasn't really used in PA until 1996, also there is a quote that is Madeline Albright but she wasn't Security of State until 1993. However, the setting of 1991 allows for a modern audience to remember or to learn what the world was like without cellphones or WIFI, fear is heighted without those. The use of "come as you are" though the book was rather great, I listened to in and it's gave such the right creepy vibe for the scence it's used it, and led to questions about the line "I don't have a gun" and how that would play out. To that point there are moments where it's odd to have a man writing about women's safety that felt a bit odd to me- it was someone who had been told about the experience but not lived it as much. I enjoyed Charlie's passion and references to films, it made it so visual for me as I could picture the movies in her mind or the movies she was referencing, also the backstory of her name was great.

I was surprised the murders didn't have a SA element, not that all campus crimes have to have that, but I wasn't sure if it was an element that just wasn't being mentioned to not be overly traumatic, once Robbie is relived as the campus killer which was both a great final twist and oddly disappointed that it was able to be tied up with the crimes being solved. With the mentioned of Take back the night and rape whistles I was surprised SA wasn't part of it until Robbie explains why he killed each of them. Additionally, I was disappointed in Maddie's mother for blaming Charlie so much, but that was really amped up by Maude. It was a GREAT twist that she was behind all of it, and the shift how her character was seen.

It was a great story, the way it plays with the what is and isn't happening, with the twist, the way the tension building. I was surprised and impressed by it which hasn't happened in a thriller in a while.

Content Warnings

nicoleharris's review against another edition

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mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

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