There is a mystique that comes with a movie from a bygone era. Though usually fictional, they encapsulate a specific story from a specific place and time brought to life by a cast and crew. By extension, characters are also enveloped within the reels of film—an actor’s performance is set in amber, available to watch and rewatch days, weeks, and even decades later.
The Star and the Strange Moon by Constance Sayers makes this metaphysical view of cinema literal.
The central quandary involves the mysterious disappearance of the young actor Gemma Turner in 1968 while she was working on the French New Wave horror film, L’Étrange Lune. What made her disappearance even more ominous is that the film disappeared, popping up only once every decade for a screening for a handful of individuals who received invitations and attended the viewing wearing masks. To increase the intrigue (and the danger) around the movie, it seems that people connected to the film meet ill-fated ends, causing many to say that it’s cursed. Those few who’ve attended one of these clandestine viewings are deeply disturbed by it, though they won’t say why, as talking about the film also seems to result in an untimely death.
Given this description, it’s probably no surprise to you that there is a compelling pall over Constance Sayers’s novel. This feeling sets in from the first page, where we meet one of the book’s two point-of-view characters, Christopher Kent, as a child. In this chapter, which takes place in 1986, we meet a very young Christopher and his mother, a woman with clear mental heath problems who can’t provide him a stable home or have him enrolled in school. Christopher’s mom also has some unknown connection to the actress Gemma Turner, so much so that she goes into a catatonic state after see a picture of the missing starlet on a hotel wall. Her breakdown results in Christopher being raised by his aunt and uncle, with her dying in an institution a few years later.
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The Star and the Strange Moon
Christopher’s feelings about his mother are entangled in love and pain, and his emotions bleed off the page. Sayers’s writing is at its strongest as she concocts her complex, flawed protagonists. With Christopher, it’s no surprise that he becomes obsessed with Gemma—an actor who disappeared before he was born—as an adult (most of his story takes place in the early 2000s), and that his tumultuous early childhood causes reverberations throughout his life and his relationships.
And there is, also unsurprisingly, a thread of tragedy attached to Gemma as well. She is the other point-of-view character in the book, and we follow her in the months before her disappearance and what happens after. Gemma has her own complex relationships in the lead-up before her unexpected exit from our world, including a volatile rockstar boyfriend and the film’s manipulative narcissistic director. She is a person who others want to shape and control for their own selfish desires—people who want to tell her what her story is, rather than have her write her own.
Gemma’s disappearance on L’Étrange Lune makes this literal. To the outside world it looks like she vanished mid-take, running down an alley set to look like part of a French Village circa 1878. But Gemma didn’t simply vanish—she ended up magically transported into the story of the film, where technology only went up to the 19th century and the vampires who were set to murder many in said village were real. Like Christopher, Gemma has her own complexities (though she is decidedly less flawed), and watching her grow into her own and persevere despite all that she faces, supernatural and otherwise, is gratifying.
The book weaves in and out between the two main characters’ journeys. Along the way, it also unravels the mystery (the diabolus ex machina, if you will) of what happened to Gemma back in 1968 and what the heck those once-a-decade screenings are all about, which are even more sinisterly mysterious because the movie inexplicably changes each viewing, with new scenes of Gemma added in. The stories of Christopher and Gemma also intertwine in a way we’ve seen before in the genre, though one could argue that this shift could have been done more deftly.
Overall, however, The Star and the Strange Moon is an engaging read. When that compelling pall lifts and the fog of mystery clears, however, the tone of the novel changes to one that’s bittersweet-but-hopeful. This transition isn’t unwelcome, exactly, but the move feels abrupt and not fully earned. The fast-paced cadence found in the middle of the book—a ramp-up from the gradual worldbuilding and character development found in the beginning—screeches back down, which perhaps makes that change in tone feel discordant more than a smooth segue.
But while the ending of the story, specifically where Gemma and Christopher end up, might not be one that I personally clicked with, it’s very likely something that many other readers will love. And although there were parts of the story that didn’t work as well for me as other parts did, I still enjoyed reading it and would happily recommend it to others, especially those with a penchant for old cinema and/or richly created characters thrown into unexpected (sometimes supernatural) settings.
The Star and the Strange Moon is published by Redhook.
Vanessa Armstrong is a writer with bylines at The LA Times, SYFY WIRE, StarTrek.com and other publications. She lives in Los Angeles with her dog Penny and her husband Jon, and she loves books more than most things. You can find more of her work on her website or follow her on Twitter @vfarmstrong.
