Survive the Night: A Novel

Charlie’s inability to stay grounded in reality feeds into her struggle to trust wisely and balance justified suspicion with paranoia. At times, Charlie trusts too much, often distracted or misled by her hallucinations. She enters a stranger’s car even as a nearby “Take Back the Night” flyer advises her not to trust strangers. She follows Marge, who kidnaps and tortures her. She also doesn’t question Robbie until his role in Maddy’s death is undeniable. Conversely, she tends to leap to conclusions when her suspicion is sparked. Though her suspicion of Josh is proven to be justified, given his false identity and his knowledge about the tooth, she is so immersed in her internal cinematic narrative that she cannot pivot. Once her mind has cast him as the worst possible villain, he cannot become anything more nuanced. This issue is exacerbated by her lack of trust in herself, which Josh further deteriorates with his gaslighting. Over the course of the novel, Charlie must learn who she can actually trust in order to survive.

The manner in which gaslighting destabilizes a person’s instincts related to trust, especially regarding themselves, is an important aspect of this theme. The novel’s use of red herrings in Josh and Marge adds to this aspect. The motif of Maddy’s mantra (“Be smart. Be brave. Be careful.”) marks her conscious effort to combat The Blurred Line Between Reality and Imagination. Josh’s use of his knowledge about Charlie’s movie hallucinations, however, exacerbates the blurring of that line, using it to his advantage. At one point, despite her instincts telling her otherwise, Charlie reflects that she “could be wrong about Josh. It could all be a huge misunderstanding. Her fanciful imagination running at full gallop because her life has been a guilt-ridden train wreck for two months” (118). After she hallucinates Maddy attacking her, reacting badly enough to startle the other woman in the bathroom, Charlie decides that she is indeed “no longer capable of trusting what she sees” and “that it [is] herself she [doesn’t] trust” (124). She then leaves, believing that “if she can’t trust herself, then she needs to trust Josh” (125). This belief only changes when she becomes conscious of Josh’s gaslighting: Josh asks if she is carsick, something he asked when she was supposedly hallucinating; Charlie notices the music has been started over from the beginning; and she sees the word “HELP” that she wrote on the window (140, 142).

In turn, following Josh’s betrayal of her trust, Charlie continues to struggle to find something between full trust and outright paranoia. Still clinging to character archetypes as a way of determining the trustworthiness of others, Charlie chooses to trust Marge. That Marge turns out to be untrustworthy stings:

A stinging sense of betrayal streaks her fear. She had liked Marge. She trusted her. Charlie had thought of her as kind and grandmotherly—not too different from Nana Norma. As a result, Charlie had gone out of her way to protect her when she should have been focusing on her own safety (238).

Though Marge reveals herself to be Maddy’s grandmother, a woman striving to discover her granddaughter’s killer, Marge’s willingness to kidnap, torture, and even kill Charlie to get information makes Charlie’s decision to trust her a poor one. This second failed choice in terms of trust is another clear piece of evidence that living mentally in a film world does not serve Charlie well.

The final revelation that Robbie is the real Campus Killer marks the greatest failure of Charlie’s cinematic methods of evaluating the trustworthiness of the people in her life. With the veneer of his archetype stripped away, Robbie is “a complete stranger to her now” (295). Charlie’s declaration before she drives his car into the ravine—“I’m going to kill you” (300)—is both literal and metaphorical. The line and her subsequent action mark her acceptance that the man she loved was only an illusion. That man is dead, in a sense, and Charlie is now prepared to take revenge on the real man left in that illusion’s place.

Overall, the novel emphasizes that real people are generally more layered—in terms of motivations and emotions—than characters in a movie. Josh, despite his aggression and secrecy, is someone that Charlie can trust. Marge had secret violent intentions for her, but only because the woman was desperate to find her granddaughter’s killer; after Marge apologizes to Charlie, the two form a mutual understanding. This fact, in turn, makes determining who and how to trust a persistent challenge. Something between immediate trust and constant paranoia is necessary.

Survive the Night focuses heavily on how the blame for violence against women is often shifted from the men who commit that violence to the women who are victims of it. The novel showcases society’s blaming of women through, for example, the university’s focus on female responsibility, Charlie’s guilt over Maddy’s murder, and Robbie’s justification for killing women. After the Campus Killer begins his murders, Olyphant University responds by teaching all the women at the university self-defense classes and supplying them with pepper spray. Though these tools may be useful to women, as Charlie later notes, taking only these actions puts all the responsibility of preventing and stopping misogynistic violence on women rather than on the men who commit it.

After Maddy’s murder, Charlie internalizes the idea of female responsibility for misogynistic violence. She blames herself for not stopping Maddy’s murder or saving her in time. This self-directed blame torments Charlie psychologically; for Charlie, it is an integral part of The Devastation of Grief, strong enough to nearly drive her to suicide. Charlie’s internalization of this responsibility also shapes her actions. She comes to view stopping the harm befalling women as her personal responsibility. Accordingly, she takes great personal risk; that is, believing Josh to be the killer, she resolves to confront and stop him single-handedly. Only when Marge tells Charlie that women need to support each other does Charlie realize the depth of misogyny and victim-blaming present in society. Charlie’s epiphany is captured in the following passage:

She blamed herself and hated herself and punished herself because that’s what women are taught to do. […] No one tells women that none of it is their fault. That the blame falls squarely on the awful men who do terrible things and the fucked-up society that raises them, molds them, makes excuses for them. People don’t want to admit that there are monsters in their midst, so the monsters continue to roam free and the cycle of violence and blame continues (179).

Charlie later learns that the man who hurt the women at Olyphant, including Maddy, is Robbie and not Josh. Nonetheless, Charlie’s epiphany holds: She was not responsible for Maddy’s death.

Robbie’s inherently misogynistic explanation for why he kills his victims, all female thus far, ties into this theme as well. Robbie does not explicitly state that he seeks out female victims because they are women. However, his explanation for why his victims deserve to die represents a sincere belief that women should remain passive and silent. Robbie murdered Maddy “because she was too brash […] Always loud. Always demanding attention” (294). Similarly, he murdered the other two women because “[t]hey thought they deserved the attention they were constantly begging for” (294). In contrast, the “special” women, or the ones undeserving of harm, are women who are demure, modest, and quiet. Charlie, by finally re-establishing The Blurred Line Between Reality and Imagination enough to see the real Robbie, becomes assertive enough to prompt Robbie to attempt to kill her too.