Flashout

New York Times culture reporter Soloski (Here in the Dark) delivers a heady, atmospheric thriller that underscores the dark side of art-making. Allison Morales arrives in New York City in 1972 “so hungry for experience that some days I could taste it like blood in the back of my throat.” She falls in with Theater Negative, a cultlike group of avant-garde performers living in squalor and clinging to their ’60s heyday. She’s utterly seduced, both by the group’s intoxicating notions of personal freedom and by their leader, Peter, who cycles through the young women who drift into Theater Negative’s orbit. After Allison is expelled from school, she joins the group on a hastily assembled European tour that quickly turns disastrous when an attempt at a pornographic film shoot leads to sexual assault and murder. Soloski braids together the ’70s timeline with one set 25 years later, when Allison is teaching theater in L.A. and reckoning with her days in Theater Negative. Eventually, she decides to seek out the group’s surviving members. The tone is pitch-black throughout, with the older Allison frankly assessing the harm she’s inflicted in response to the harm she suffered, but Soloski’s darkly seductive prose wrings harsh beauty from the characters’ pain. The results are grimly satisfying. Agent: Sarah Burnes, Gernert Co. (Aug.)