Smile for the Cameras
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jun 24, 2025
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
An actress desperate to reclaim her fame must survive the real-life plot of the horror movie that made her famous in this psychologically twisted locked-room thriller.
“A gloriously glossy solid slasher with more unexpected twists than a roller coaster . . . Fans of ’90s horror flicks (like me) are going to lap this up.”—John Marrs, USA Today bestselling author of The Family Experiment
Twenty years ago, Ella Winters was the it girl. She made a name for herself in Hollywood and throughout America as the sole survivor in the cult-classic slasher Grad Night. But the real horror is what happened when the cameras weren’t rolling—something terrible that Ella and her co-stars agreed never to speak of again. Shortly after the movie’s premiere, Ella disappeared from the acting scene under the pretense of caring for her ailing mother, hoping for a quiet life out of the spotlight to ease her guilty mind.
Since her mother’s passing, Ella has decided to return to the silver screen. And with the cast and crew of Grad Night in the process of filming a reunion documentary, Ella has an express ticket back into Hollywood’s good graces. Weighed down by the secret she’s been keeping all these years, Ella apprehensively makes the trip to the original set—a cabin in rural Tennessee—to reunite with her castmates for the first time in more than a decade. But when the actors begin to meet the same gruesome fates as the characters they originally played, falling victim to someone dressed as the Grad Night villain, it’s clear their secret is out.
Now, the question is: Can the final girl survive one last nightmare?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An actor revisits her breakthrough role with bloody results in this dull closed-circle slasher from Smith (Did You See Evie?). After taking a break from the silver screen, middle-aged movie star Ella Winters worries that her career has lost its momentum. Then she gets an offer: if she participates in a documentary about Grad Night, the franchise-spawning horror movie that put her on the map decades ago, she'll land a role in a major new film. The documentary shoot would reunite her with her castmates, whom she hasn't seen in years, and require her to return to Tennessee's Blackstone Cottage, where the film was shot. Despite her fears that the documentary could stir up ghosts from her past, Ella accepts. Shortly after production begins, someone starts killing cast and crew members with methods similar to those of the killer in Grad Night. While horror movie fans might appreciate Smith's reverence for the genre, her plotting is predictable, and snatches of the Grad Night script, which Smith intersperses between chapters, are limp and uninspired. The result reads like a pallid version of I Know What You Did Last Summer.
