Dual timelines, magic, fancy cinema, feisty heroine, fairy tale/horror movie touch... Oh, yeah, these are some things I dig and it turns out that they all work together pretty well in this book!  Phew.  It was atmospheric and layered and you could easily envision the world and the frustrations.  It was a weird but delightful mix of surreal and real.  (Even with using the audiobook which I have a hit-miss relationship with those things and listening at 1.8 speed gives one of the character a very Drac from Hotel Transylania speech pattern.  Blah blah blah.)  

Like a lot of people have said, the book has a slow start and you don't quite know where you are going with it for a few chapters, switching between 1968 and Gemma Turner (a star who tried to get out of Beach Blanket movies and into Serious Cinema) and the 1980-onwards with Christopher Knight (an eventual film student with a messy, well, EVERYTHING.)  While I could see some of the plot points coming from a mile away, some of that is due to the book running with tropes and just the fact that most of it was more a vibes thing than a mystery thing.  Knowing what was coming did not make it any less interesting, though, and sometimes I was looking forward to seeing what Sayers was going to exactly handle it.  

Hands down, Gemma and her, uh, supporting cast were the stars.  Funny, smart, vulnerable, and fairly kick-ass, Gemma won me over very quickly.  Even when she doubted herself and sometimes did the random stupid thing, I loved her.  She had a wryness and determination that speaks volumes.  On the other hand, Christopher was an acquired taste.  At times, he was fine and I sympathized greatly with his rather awful childhood but that can only take you so far when you start being really, darn creepy.  I think, possibly and not meaning-to, Sayers was writing him somewhat autistic.  Of course, that is not an excuse for him.  He still came across at times as an unfortunate mix of pretentious film student and obsessive stalker.  Thankfully, he wasn't always like that or I would have screamed.

But still... It's all about Gemma.  :)

"When you think back on watching L'etrange Lune, how do you remember it?"

The above question--a The Star and the Strange Moon-adapted quote from I Saw the TV Glow--sprang to mind while reading this book, because the novel and my favorite movie of 2024 indeed share overlap. Both explore cult fascination with a piece of media and what the fixation says about the watcher more than what's being watched, and both L'etrange Lune and The Pink Opaque aren't what Christopher and Owen think they are at first. Truthfully, if I had to describe The Star... to someone, I'd pitch it as "TV Glow without the trans stuff: a creepy interaction between someone and the story they love, and their desire to use it to fill a missing center."

The core difference is that The Star lets us spend way more time inside the horror itself with Gemma. The book could be accused of being a little slow to start, but this to me is a necessary investment on two fronts: Gemma's opening stretches ground us in her character so that we're able to follow her once the story's off to the races, and damn near everything present there comes back again. One of my favorite things about this book is the way it absolutely nails set-up and payoff.

The other favorites are that it's just suited to my taste. The atmosphere, the setting, the use of monsters, time loops, dreamscapes, the projections of an inner mind...all deeply my shit.