Flashout

The opposite of a blackout, a flashout cranks up the lights during live theater at the act's end, practically blinding the oft-unsuspecting audience. In 1972 New York City, a not-so-innocent 19-year-old falls in with a charismatic arts troupe—will she be blinded by their light or see the past-their-prime players for who they really are? Flashout is Alexis Soloski’s follow-up to her debut thriller, Here in the Dark, and the author skillfully combines the theatrical suspense of M.L. Rio with the horror-quirk of David Lynch in a cautionary tale of a guerrilla performance gone very, very wrong.

California native Allison is in her second year at a women’s college, getting excellent grades by day, fooling around with her roommate by night and eager to experience life beyond dorm curfews and staid acting classes. Enter Theater Negative, a radical downtown collective with a controversial reputation and a magnetic frontman who has a conveniently open marriage and a penchant for young women. Flash forward to 1997: “Ali” is teaching theater at a California private school, seeing women and sleeping with the school’s male dean on the sly, and still trying to shake the aftereffects of Theater Negative. Ali’s brand-new inbox of “electronic mail” soon fills with mysterious messages from someone who knows her deepest secret. What really happened that night in Berlin in 1972, on what would be Theater Negative’s final tour? And how long can Ali run from her past?

Soloski has a background in theater criticism and brings that specific knowledge of a fascinating (and often borderline-incestuous) industry to her fiction. In Flashout, Soloski journeys from the theater criticism milieu of Here in the Dark to the the stage itself—whether that stage is a university auditorium in England, a prep school classroom of teens auditioning for A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Germany’s dark and deep Black Forest. The characters are standouts in their own right, from arrested-development poster child Allison to her closest troupe mate, Italian Brooklynite sex worker Rosa, to willful and enterprising student director Naomi, who’s not above blackmail to get a stellar college recommendation. Soloski’s sophomore novel combines the crackling suspense of the best thrillers with scrappy theater-kid energy, leaving the reader blinded by the light of what a performance can truly be—and the destruction that can follow.