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Read an Excerpt From The Unknown by Riley Sager
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Horror
Read an Excerpt From The Unknown by Riley Sager
In 1926, five women disappeared from a remote island in Vermont. Now, one hundred years later, it’s happening again.
By Riley Sager
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Published on July 21, 2026
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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Unknown, a horror novel by Riley Sager publishing with Dutton on August 4th.
Struggling actress Marin Keane is shocked when she lands a role in a major motion picture about the unsolved mystery of New Avalon, an island on sprawling Lake Faraday in Vermont. She’s even more surprised when she learns that the role requires a weeklong research trip to that very spot.Because New Avalon isn’t your ordinary island. A century ago, it was a commune for spiritual mediums—until they all vanished in 1926. The only trace of them was five dresses hanging from the branches of an old oak tree in the middle of the island, one for each missing woman. Some locals say they simply left. Others think they were murdered. But the prevailing opinion, thanks to a diary left behind by one of the vanished, a young woman named Daisy Rue, is that a séance gone wrong conjured something supernatural that took them all one by one.Not long after arriving, Marin and her castmates, including legendary actress Violet Wright and white-hot director Ronan Peters, begin to realize all is not right with New Avalon. They hear strange noises in the night and notice mysterious symbols left behind by the island’s previous occupants. And after a sudden health emergency leaves Marin, Ronan, and the other actors stranded on the island, the disappearances begin again.Is it the work of someone trying to derail the movie? Or is the island’s alleged supernatural past catching up with the present? As fear and suspicion mount, Marin turns to Daisy’s diary, hoping it holds the key to figuring out what really happened to the women of New Avalon—and how to keep the island’s terrible history from repeating itself.
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The Unknown
Riley Sager
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The Unknown
Riley Sager
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One
The island sits in the middle of the lake, a black smudge on the horizon. Although I can see it when the car pulls up to the dock, its details remain elusive, out of reach. Less an island than the suggestion of one.
Loretta is waiting for me on the dock, her ensemble as dark as the distant island behind her. Black slacks. Black blazer. Black Wayfarers. Her presence is unexpected. One, she’s the producer and, presumably, has better things to do. Two, I didn’t even know she was going to be here. And, three, I was supposed to be dropped off an hour ago.
Even though the delay was caused by a snarl of traffic near Albany and the driver’s fickle GPS, it’s never good to be late for your first day on the job. Especially one like this. That’s why I spring from the car before it comes to a complete stop, apologies at the ready.
“I’m so sorry! You wouldn’t believe the number of cars on the road at this hour.”
“Ronan and the others have already been taken to the island,” Loretta tells me as we collect my bags from the car. “They can’t wait to meet you. We’re all so excited.”
“Me, too!” I exclaim, feigning enthusiasm, when in truth I’m tired and slightly carsick from the hours-long ride to Vermont.
And nervous.
So nervous it makes my legs heavy as we head to a waiting powerboat. Weighed down by anxiety and my suitcase, I shuffle across the dock, trying in vain to keep up with Loretta’s long, confident strides.
There’s not another boat on the water, making the lake as smooth as glass. The rest of the dock is also empty save for a man waiting by the boat. He’s a cliché in his own right. An old salt plucked from central casting. Grizzled face, gray beard, years of peering at the sun-brightened water giving him a perpetual squint.
“I’m Pete,” he says while taking the suitcase from my hands and hoisting it into the boat. “Welcome aboard.”
“I’m Marin,” I say. “Sorry about forcing you to make another trip.”
Pete sniffs. “Don’t you worry about that. Had to make two trips anyway to get the earlier crew over there. This ain’t no trouble at all. You another one of them actresses?”“Yes,” I say, and for the first time in my life, it doesn’t feel like a lie.
I am an actress.
Who, as of three days ago, was still working as a waitress. How this all came to pass remains a blur in my anxiety-riddled, sleep-deprived memory. It happened so fast that it still feels like a fever dream.
Exactly one week ago, my agent, Veronica, sent me a casting notice for a movie that called for a woman in her late twenties with a “period look.” Lucky for me, I fit the bill.
Still, I couldn’t help but think it was all some kind of mistake.
“You want me to audition for a movie?” I said when I called Veronica on my break.
“It’ll be good experience for you,” she said, indicating that even she had no illusions I could actually book the part.
“What kind of movie is it?”
“Horror,” Veronica said, quickly adding, “Elevated horror. Whatever that means. I assume it’s respectable since Ronan Peters is directing and Violet Wright has agreed to star.”
I gulped down my shock. The Ronan Peters directing the Violet Wright? In a horror movie, no less? An unexpected pairing like that would definitely get people talking. This was indeed a real movie. A potentially huge one.
“I was told it’s a casting emergency. The original actress just dropped out, leaving them in the lurch two weeks before production starts.”
My heart did a backflip in my chest. “Two weeks?”
“Yes,” Veronica said. “They’re desperate.”
Because the role’s description wasn’t exactly a boost to an actress’s ego, I opted to lean into it. Minimal makeup. My brown hair plain and straight. Shapeless tan dress that made me look like an extra from Little House on the Prairie or someone in a Netflix cult documentary. That was apparently a good thing. When I entered the audition room, the casting director perked up in her folding chair and all but purred, “Who do we have here?”
“Marin Keane,” I said, peeling my headshot from my sweaty palm. I handed it to the casting director, who gestured for me to stand in front of a camcorder mounted on a tripod.
“Is this your first audition for a film?”
The question came from a man quietly seated behind the camcorder. I’d been so laser focused on the casting director that I hadn’t noticed him. But now that he had my attention, I realized the man wasn’t just some random assistant.
It was Ronan Peters.
The Ronan Peters.
“Yes,” I said, surprised I could summon even a single word in his presence.
You’re nervous.”
Even though it was a statement and not a question, I found myself answering with a nod. No point in denying the obvious.
“Don’t be,” Ronan said. “Don’t even think of this as an audition. I’d like it to be more of a conversation. Just you and me getting to know each other. Does that sound good to you, Marin?”
“It does,” I said, although I have never felt comfortable in my own skin. That’s one of the reasons I’ve always wanted to be an actress. So I could be someone other than my plain, boring self, if only for a little while.
Still, Ronan looked at me like I was the world’s most interesting woman. Leaning forward, he switched on the camcorder and said, “Where did you grow up?”
“Pennsylvania.”
“No siblings?”
I didn’t have a quick answer for that one. To say no would have been a lie. As would saying yes. I ended up splitting the difference with a simple, non-explanatory “Just me.”
“I’m also an only child,” Ronan said, a misunderstanding that I was all too happy not to correct. “But I always wanted an older brother or sister. Was it the same way with you?”
“Growing up, I longed to have another person in the house,” I said. “Someone capable of distracting my parents away from me.”
“Interesting,” Ronan said, sounding like he genuinely meant it. “Most children crave their parents’ attention. Why did you want the opposite?”
“Because I was their sole focus, which was great when I was little, torture when it became clear I wasn’t the daughter they wanted or expected.”
“What do you think they wanted?” Ronan asked.
“Someone prettier,” I said. “Someone smarter and more popular and more outgoing. Someone without an overactive imagination.”
“In my opinion, having a vivid imagination is a good thing,” Ronan said. “That’s why we’re holding these auditions at the last minute, as I’m sure you’ve heard. The original actress who was cast suffered from a lack of imagination. And seeing how I’m making a horror movie, which I’m sure you also know, I need someone who has the opposite problem.”
He peered at me, more attentive than ever. “Tell me a story. A ghost story. Something scary. Something … dreadful.”
My heart rattled against my ribcage, anxious yet also oddly overjoyed. Because I happened to know a ghost story.
A scary one.
At least it was to me.
“A long time ago,” I began, “when I was just a little girl, I saw a ghost.”
Thirty minutes later, I emerged onto a hot, crowded street, blinking against the bright August sun. I couldn’t believe the things I’d said during the audition, if it even was an audition. It had truly felt, as Ronan suggested, like a conversation. One of those rare, fleeting moments in which two strangers are completely honest with each other, likely because they know their paths will never cross again. I certainly never expected to see Ronan Peters again.
Yet two hours later, Veronica called, her voice thick with disbelief. “Marin, you got the part.”
I shrieked with joy right there on the sidewalk.
“There’s one catch,” Veronica said. “They need you in Vermont on Monday.”
I let out a shocked huff. It was Friday.
Now, after two days of costume fittings and hair and makeup tests and requesting a leave of absence from my job at the restaurant, I am here, about to be whisked off to an island in the middle of a lake in Middle-of-Nowhere, Vermont.
Loretta has already climbed inside the boat and now sits next to Pete, frantically tapping out a text on her phone. Before stepping aboard, I check my own phone. There’s a text from Veronica wishing me luck, plus another one from a number I don’t recognize.
are you marin keane?
Yes, I reply. Who is this?
the woman you replaced
I suck in a mouthful of lake air, surprised. Why is the actress who had the role before me now sending me a text?
I tap out two words that I hope will appease her. I’m sorry
Three dots appear on the screen, rippling ominously until a response appears. that’s not why i’m doing this
Then why did you contact me?
From the boat, Loretta says, “You ready to go? Ronan just texted. He’s thrilled you’ve arrived and is eager to get started.”
“Sorry,” I say before shoving the phone back into my pocket and stepping into the boat. Once seated behind Pete, I flash Loretta a wide smile, hoping it hides my unease. There’s nothing overtly worrisome about the woman’s texts. For all I know, she could be congratulating me on getting the part and saying that there are no hard feelings.
Yet I can’t shake the sense that’s not at all why she texted.
Pete pushes the boat away from the dock, sending us adrift for a moment before bringing the engine to life. Soon we’re skidding over the lake, heading straight toward an island that, oddly, never appears to get closer. It remains the same size on the horizon, leading me to think the place is bigger than I first assumed. There are certainly no new details to see. It continues to be a dark void surrounded by pristine water.
“How far away is the island?” I ask Pete.
“Too far to be making a movie there,” Pete says with a judgmental sniff.
“We’re not filming yet. This is just—”
I struggle to find a way to describe something I don’t fully understand myself. The movie itself will start shooting next week on a set still being built in North Carolina. This week in Vermont is part of pre-production. A boot camp, of sorts, for the five actresses starring in the movie.
“This is going to be a fast shoot,” Ronan said while explaining the schedule to me over lunch with him and Loretta the day after I was cast. “Since there won’t be a lot of room for error, I need all of you to have a good grasp on your characters before the cameras roll. I know it may seem a bit extreme.”
“He means obsessive,” Loretta added with an eye roll.
“So we’re going to be spending an entire week on an island?”
“Five days, but close enough.” Ronan looked at me across the table, his glasses framing the excitement in his blue eyes. “The only way this story will work is if audiences feel like they’ve been transported back in time. Every detail, from the way your costumes are sewn to the glass in the windows, must be authentic.”
That quest for authenticity, I learned, also extends to the cast. Ronan wants us to spend time on an island in Vermont, just like the women we’ll be playing did. We’ll live the way they lived, including cooking the way they cooked, eating what they ate, dressing how they dressed. That means no phones, no devices, nothing that didn’t exist in 1926.
“It’s a retreat,” I finally say to Pete. “We’ll be living the way our characters did.”
“Will you be talking to ghosts, then?”
I give him a look, surprised he knows what the movie’s about. “You’ve heard of New Avalon?”
Pete nods, his eyes still focused on the island in the distance. “Everyone around these parts has.”
Odd.
I had never heard the story until Ronan and Loretta told me about it during that fateful lunch.
“Have you ever heard of New Avalon? It’s an island in Vermont.”
Loretta chimed in. “It used to be the summer retreat of the industrialist Roderick Semple, who got filthy rich making cannons and cannonballs during the Civil War. When he died, his spinster daughter, Ruth Hume Semple, turned it into some kind of commune. Every spring, she would arrive with a small group of women and head off to the island. She’d stay there all summer, with various women coming and going. What they did on the island prompted quite a bit of speculation. Some locals claimed it was a coven of witches. There were rumors of chanting and bonfires and the women dancing naked in the woods. Others swore they were harmless. Just a bunch of rich girls living off the land. No one really knew what went on there—or even how many people were on the island at any given time—until 1926.”
“That’s when they vanished,” Ronan said, denying Loretta the kicker to her own story.
A chill passed through me then, even though we were outside, dining on a rooftop terrace in the August heat. “Why?”
“Apparently, Ruth Hume Semple and the others were mediums of some sort,” Loretta said. “At the time, spiritualism was all the rage. The first world war and the Spanish flu had just killed millions. Everybody lost loved ones. People were grieving. And many of them sought to ease their grief by attempting to contact the dead, including the women of New Avalon. But during one of those séances, something went wrong.”
“They apparently accidentally summoned something,” Ronan said. “A ghost.”
“Or some kind of evil entity that started taking the women one by one until there was no one left,” Loretta added.
I sat there, speechless, thinking about the previous day’s conversation-that-was-really-an-audition.
Tell me a story.
A ghost story.
Now, forty-eight hours later, I’m heading to the exact spot where those women lived and ate and slept, not to mention disappeared.
My phone pings again and I jerk it from my pocket. There’s a follow-up text from the actress I replaced, finally answering my question.
to warn you
About what? I type.
I stare at the screen, anxiously watching the blue dots ripple across the bottom, signaling her imminent reply.
don’t set foot on that island. if you do, i swear, you WILL regret it
This is a condensed first chapter of Riley Sager’s The Unknown, on shelves August 4th. Copyright © 2026 by Riley Sager.
The post Read an Excerpt From <i>The Unknown</i> by Riley Sager appeared first on Reactor.
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