The Turnout

Best Book of the Year
NPR • Wall Street Journal • Boston Globe • Library Journal • CrimeReads • LitReactor • Air Mail

• Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize

• A TODAY Show #ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick

• An Instant New York Times Bestseller

A finalist for:
International Thriller Writers Award
Housatonic Book Award

Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize

One of:
TIME’s 36 News Books You Need to Read This Summer
Entertainment Weekly’s Best Books of August
Washington Post’s Eight Thrillers and Mysteries to Read this Summer
The Boston Globe‘s Summer Reading 2021 Picks
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Great New Books to Read in August
Wall Street Journal’s 11 Books to Read: The Best Reviews of August
Oprah Daily’s 33 Best Thrillers That’ll Keep You Turning the Page
Vogue’s Best Books to Read This Summer
Real Simple’s Up-All-Night Thrillers
Harper’s Bazaar’s 46 Books You Need to Read in 2021
Refinery29’s 38 Books You’ll Want to Read This Summer
The A.V. Club’s Four Hard-Hitting Crime Novels to Get You Through the End of Summer
CNN‘s 20 Most Anticipated New Books to Read This August
New York Post’s 30 Best Books on Our Summer Reading List in 2021
Seattle Times’ Most Anticipated Books of 2021
Insider‘s 10 Best New Books to Read in August 
Apartment Therapy’s Must-read Book of the Month
Adore Magazine’s New Releases to Enjoy this Season
Inside Hook’s 10 Books You Should Be Reading This August
Glitter Guide’s 8 Books To Add To Your Reading List This August
The Millions‘s Most Anticipated Books of 2021
Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2021
Reader’s Digest 50 Best Fiction Books to Read This Year
CrimeReads’ Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2021
Publishers Weekly’s Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2021: Mystery/Thriller
BookPage’s Most Anticipated Mysteries and Thrillers of 2021
BookRiot’s 20 Must-Read Crime Novels to Keep You Up At Night
Booktrib’s Most Anticipated
SheReads’s Most Anticipated 2021 Summer Thrillers for your Beach Bag

“Pulsing with suspense.” –People, “Book of the Week”

“Abbott’s novels are often described as crime fiction, and, while indeed she works with mystery and suspense and draws on noir and Gothic tropes, her goal seems less to construct intricate, double-crossing plot problems than to explore the dark side of femininity….In other words, Megan Abbott is a mood.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Abbott is a legend for good reason. No one combines the style of classic noir with the psyches of sophisticated men and women who are willing to do anything—anything—to succeed better than Abbott. Her latest is a dizzyingly fascinating story of a family-owned dance studio and the weight of unrequited ambition. An instant classic.” –Washington Post

“Compelling…Abbott leaves her audience riveted with each twist and turn, leading to a dramatic denouement. It’s a fantastic work in every way.” –Manhattan Book Review

“Ms. Abbott’s prose has never been more impressive than in this whirlpool of psychological suspense, shocking images, well-wrought metaphors—and one final twist that rattles like a serpent’s tail in Eden.” ­–Wall Street Journal

“Abbott is a master of atmosphere, and in the blood, sweat, tears, bruises, ripped toenails, broken bones, rivalries, desires, and tutu-pink dreams that fill the studio during its annual production of The Nutcracker, she creates a world of almost unbearable tension, pirouetting ever further into darkness.” –Entertainment Weekly

“[A] beautifully accomplished thriller…From the first page to the reveal at the end, a palpable sense of menace and the sympathy we feel for Dara as her world unravels make it impossible to look away.” –Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“Sharp and unsettling prose.” —TIME

“Abbott—so good at plucking the dark and twisted strands of female friendships and rivalries in books like You Will Know Me and Give Me Your Hand—fashions her unsettling new novel around a ballet academy run by three high-strung former dancers, two of them sisters.” –The New York Times

“While undoubtedly one of our best crime novelists, Abbott has also always struck me as akin to an anthropologist….In The Turnout, Abbott delves into the rarified world of ballerinas, astutely noting the symbols and signals underlying the romantic image.” –The Paris Review

“No one takes seemingly harmless environments and cracks them open to reveal their dark heart quite like Megan Abbott, and she does it again here with a tense narrative about the backstage antics of a ballet school that looks at femininity, anxiety, and power.” —Boston Globe

“Mines the creepy underside of ballet….Abbott takes her breathless reader to some very dark places, but also to beauty.” –Seattle Times

“The Turnout is a page-turner, suffused with dread even when the scene being described involves doing paperwork with a contractor….If you enjoy twisty crime novels with unmistakably dark subject matter, you’ll do well to put yourself in Abbott’s capable hands for a few hundred pages. You’ll never look at a pointe shoe the same way again.” –Chicago Review of Books

“What I love about Abbott’s books is she’s made this great niche for herself, where she applies the tone and style of film noir to stereotypically feminine areas of interest. . . . I always love her stuff, and The Turnout is no exception.” —Alan Sepinwall for NPR

“[A] taut, suspenseful novel that’s anxiety provoking in the best way.” –Vogue
 
“An excavation of the dark sides of family and femininity.” –Elle

“This is a deliciously creepy thriller about competition and family ties.” –Real Simple
 
“[The Turnout] is as tightly wound as a dancer’s bun.” –Good Housekeeping

“There’s no one better than Abbott at exploring issues of femininity and power struggles, and getting at the visceral heart of both. Fans of Black Swan and The Red Shoes are bound to be obsessed.” –Refinery29

“Come for the ballet references, stay for the family secrets and wild ending.” ­–theSkimm

“The Turnout is an intriguing crime novel about family, power, and sexuality.” –The A.V. Club

“Abbott’s prose is dazzlingly precise and her portrayal of student rivalries razor-sharp in this taut and psychologically gripping novel.” –The Guardian

“Excellent…Abbott continues her high standards in the enthralling The Turnout.” –South Florida Sun Sentinel

“[A] big, rich literary novel. A carefully controlled but free-flowing, almost musical style; episodic in structure, but with an entirely coherent theme that’s implied, unmistakably, but never presented explicitly (there is no preaching to be tolerated)….Really, a lovely read, whether you come to it with that yearning or not.” —Shawangunk Journal

“With clever storytelling that slowly and deliberately unspools, Abbott tells a tale about an unconventional family that holds on to generational trauma….Like any good firework show, Abbott creates a number of small explosions until the grand finale—and you’ll never see if coming.” –Apartment Therapy

“[The Turnout] uses the world of ballet as the setting for a story of fraught familial connections and ominous acts.” –Inside Hook

“[The Turnout] will delight readers who crave her combination of psychological insight and deep engagement with discipline—here, in a family-owned ballet studio.” ­­–Virtuoso Life

“Abbott is back full force with a story that takes place in a family-run ballet studio. If Showtime dramas have taught us anything, it’s that ballet is full of unexpected thrills and chills.” –Glitter Guide

“The Turnout unfolds like a dark fairy tale, unpacking the rigid demands of femininity. Abbott fans and suspense lovers alike won’t be disappointed with this exploration of human frailty and twisted love.” –LitHub
 
“Abbott is not only a suspense author at the top of her game, she’s also a scholar, and The Turnout promises to be both homage to classic tropes and visionary model for their evolution.“ —CrimeReads

“At once engaging and unnerving.” –Reader’s Digest

“Beautifully dark suspense . . . Abbott keeps the twists coming until the final pages. The Turnout is the kind of gripping, unnerving page turner we have come to expect from an author who does noir better than almost anyone.” —BookPage (starred review)
 
“The Turnout is one of those slow-burning thrillers where every word and gesture carries immense weight….As both Dara and Marie make key choices, the sisters’ relationship tears apart, exposing each person for who they truly are, leaving deadly, sinister destruction in its wake.” –BookTrib

“[The Turnout] is atmospheric, suspenseful, and full of marvelously juicy behind-the-scenes details.” –BookReporter

“Gut-punching noir…Abbott is pitch-perfect at making the sisters’ complex dynamic and mix of emotions plausible and painful, while capturing the competitiveness and cruelty of children’s ballet, where every young girl wishes to be the center of attention. This look at the darker side of the dance world demonstrates why Abbott has few peers at crafting moving stories of secrets and broken lives.” ­–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Abbott has a top-notch ability to reveal the dark undercurrents of women’s relationships and sexuality. Her taut, unsettling writing creates tension through the slightest actions and phrases, and keeps the pages turning. This is clever, chilling psychological suspense at its best.” –Library Journal (starred review)

“Abbott brilliantly explores the psychosexual undercurrents throbbing throughout this haunting novel, from the dancers’ pointe shoes…through even the Nutcracker itself.” –Booklist (starred review)

“The mesmerizing prose will keep you turning the pages. Abbott is a master of thinly veiled secrets often kept by women who rage underneath their delicate exteriors.” –Kirkus Reviews

“One of the most well-known and acclaimed thriller writers working today is back with a twisted tale of fraying ties at a family-run ballet studio.” –BookPage

“Immersive, seductive . . . Abbott’s singular and inimitable voice defines the tension perfectly throughout, scratching across the page like the sharpest knife.” —Rain Taxi

“There’s no one who captures the atmosphere of a tight-knit hothouse world, in all its feverish beauty and brutality, quite like Megan Abbott.” –Tana French, author of The Searcher

“All one needs to know about a Megan Abbott book is that it’s a Megan Abbott book — dreamy, sexy, a deep dive into a subculture that has been exhaustively researched. The Turnout is all those things and more, taking you so far into the world of a small ballet school that you feel the characters’ aches and pains in your joints, your feet, and, most dangerous of all, your heart.” –Laura Lippman, author of Lady in the Lake

“There is not a writer alive who is better at investigating the tension and threat of violence at the center of women’s lives than Megan Abbott. Megan goes into the heart of female spaces and finds the ugly in all that pretty, the dark in all that light, with breath-taking suspense. The Turnout has notes of James M. Cain and Alfred Hitchcock, but it’s better because it’s so fresh and unexpected, so wholly revelatory. I turned page after page, holding my breath in fear, and also excitement, about what might happen in this run-down ballet school, what blood red might be lurking behind all that pink. This is Megan Abbott working at the absolute height of her talent.” –Attica Locke, author of Bluebird, Bluebird and Heaven, My Home

“Megan Abbott is a master of atmosphere, and she captures the Durant School of Ballet—a tinderbox of promise and perfectionism, innuendo and fierce desire, of tension twisted to a breaking point—in all its merciless extravagance. The Turnout is a bewitching climb up a spiral staircase into the inner sanctum of the Durant family, a house of mirrors in which nothing is exactly what it seems. This novel pounds with blood and grips you in its teeth: Megan Abbott is unafraid as ever of the darkness that makes us human.” –Chloe Benjamin, author of The Immortalists

“Abbott creates a dark and mesmerizing world and, as always, is so brilliant at portraying women and girls and their competition and complexities….It makes Black Swan look like a children’s story.” –Harriet Tyce, author of Blood OrangeMegan Abbott is the award-winning author of ten novels, including Give Me Your Hand, You Will Know Me, The Fever, Dare Me, and The End of Everything. She received her PhD in literature from New York University. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Guardian, and The Believer. She is the co-creator and executive producer of USA’s adaptation of Dare Me and was a staff writer on HBO’s David Simon show The Deuce. Abbott lives in New York City.

They were dancers. Their whole lives, nearly. They were dancers who taught dance and taught it well, as their mother had.

“Every girl wants to be a ballerina . . .“

That’s what their brochure said, their posters, their website, the sentence scrolling across the screen in stately cursive.

The Durant School of Dance, est. 1986 by their mother, a former soloist with the Alberta Ballet, took up the top two floors of a squat, rusty brick office building downtown. It had become theirs after their parents died on a black-ice night more than a dozen years ago, their car caroming across the highway median. When an enterprising local reporter learned it had been their twentieth wedding anniversary, he wrote a story about them, noting their hands were interlocked even in death.

Had one of them reached out to the other in those final moments, the reporter wondered to readers, or had they been holding hands all along?

All these years later, the story of their parents’ end, passed down like lore, still seemed unbearably romantic to their students-less so to Marie, who, after sobbing violently next to her sister, Dara, through the funeral, insisted, I never saw them hold hands once.

But the Durant family had always been exotic to others, even back when Dara and Marie were little girls floating up and down the front steps of that big old house with the rotting gingerbread trim on Sycamore, the one everyone called the Hansel and Gretel house. Dara and Marie, with their long necks and soft voices. Their matching buns and duckfooted gait, swathed in scratchy winter coats, their pink tights dotting the snow. Even their names set them apart, sounding elegant and continental even though their father was an electrician and a living-room drunk and their mother had grown up eating mayonnaise sandwiches every meal, as she always told her daughters, head shaking with rue.

From kindergarten until fifth and sixth grade, Dara and Marie had attended a spooky old Catholic school on the east side, the one their father had insisted upon. Until the day their mother announced that, going forward, she would be giving them lessons at home, so they wouldn’t be beholden to the school’s primitive views of life.

Their father resisted at first, but then he came to pick them up at the schoolyard one day and saw a boy-the meanest in fifth grade, with a birthmark over his left eye like a fresh burn-trying to pull Marie’s pants down, purple corduroys to Dara’s matching pink. Marie just stood there, staring at him, her fingers touching her forehead as though bewildered, transfixed.

Their father swerved over so fast his Buick came up on the curb, the grass. Everyone saw. He grabbed the little boy by the haunches and shook him until the nuns rushed over. What kind of school, he wanted to know, are you running here?

On the car ride home, Marie announced loudly that she hadn’t minded it at all, what the boy had done.

It made my stomach wiggle, she said much more quietly to Dara in the backseat.

Their father wouldn’t talk to Marie for days. He telephoned the school and thundered at the principal, so loud they heard him from upstairs, in their bunkbed. Marie’s face in the moonlight was shiny with tears. Marie and their father were both mysterious to Dara. Mysterious and alike somehow. Primitive, their mother called them privately.

They never went back.

At home, lessons were different every day. You could never guess. Some mornings, they’d get out the great big globe from their father’s den and Dara and Marie would spin it and their mother would tell them something about the country on which their finger landed. (Singapore is the cleanest country in the world. The punishment for vandalism is caning.) Sometimes, she had to look things up in the mildewed encyclopedia in the den, its covers soft with age. Often, it seemed like she was making things up (In France, there are two kinds of toilets . . .), and they would laugh about it, the three of them, their private jokes.

We are three, their mother used to say. (They were three until they were four, but this was before Charlie came, and all of that.)

But mostly, the day-every day-was about ballet.

Their father was away for work so often, and for so long. To this substation, or to that airfield, doing things with fiber optics-none of them knew, really.

When he was gone, they wore leotards all day and danced for hours and hours, in the practice room, along the second-floor landing, in the backyard thick with weeds. They danced all day, until their feet radiated, tingled, went numb. It didn’t matter.

That was how Dara remembered it now.

House cats. That’s what their mother used to call them, which was funny, if you thought about it, because their mother was the one who kept them home with her. Not one sleepover, nor camping trip, nor a neighbor’s birthday party their entire childhood.

They made their own fun. Once, on Valentine’s Day, they all cut out valentines from faded construction paper and their mother made a lesson for them about love. She talked about all the different kinds of love and how it changed and turned and you couldn’t stop it. Love was always changing on you.

I’m in love, Marie said, like always, talking about the fifth-grade boy with the birthmark who pulled her pants down, who had once hid under her desk and tried to stick a pencil between her legs.

That’s not love, their mother said, stroking Marie’s babyfine hair, brushing the back of her hand against Marie’s forever-pink cheek.

Then she told them their favorite story, the one about a famous ballerina named Marie Taglioni, whose devotees were so passionate they once paid two hundred rubles, a fortune at that time, for a single pair of her discarded pointe shoes. After the purchase, they cooked, garnished, and ate the pointe shoes with a special sauce.

That, their mother told them, is love.

Now, more than two decades later, the Durant School of Dance was theirs.

All day, six days a week for the past more-than-a-dozen years, Dara and Marie taught in the cramped, cozy confines of the same ashen building where their mother had once reigned. Steamy and pungent in the summer and frigid, its windows snow-blurred, in the winter, the studio never changed and was forever slowly falling apart. Often thick with must, overnight rain left weeping pockets in every ceiling corner, dripping on students’ noses.

But it didn’t matter, because the students always came. Over a hundred girls and a few boys, ages three to fifteen, Pre-Ballet I to Advanced IV. And a waitlist for the rest. In the past six years, they’d advanced fourteen girls and three boys to tier-one ballet schools and thirty-six to major competitions.

Every summer, they hired two additional instructors, three on weekends, but during the school year, it was just Dara and Marie. And, of course, Charlie, once their mother’s prize student, her surrogate son, her son of the soul. And now Dara’s husband. Charlie, who couldn’t teach anymore because of his injuries but who ran all the business operations from the back office. Charlie, on whom so many students had passing crushes, a rite of passage, like the first time they took a razor blade to their hardened feet, or the first time they achieved turnout, rotating their legs from their hip sockets, bodies pushed to contortion. Pushed so far, the feeling ecstatic. Her first time, Dara felt split open, laid bare.

The Durant School of Dance was an institution. Children, teens came from three counties to take classes with them. They came with sprightly dreams and limber bodies and hard little muscles and hungry, lean bellies and a desire to enter into the fairy tale that is dance to little girls and a few special little boys. They all wanted to participate in the storied Durant tradition set forth by their mother thirty or more years ago. Encore, ŽchappŽ, ŽchappŽ, watch those knees. Their mother, her voice subdued yet steely, striding across the floor, guiding everything, mastering everything.

But now it was Dara’s and Marie’s voices-Dara’s low and flinty (Shoulders down, lift that leg, higher, higher . . .) and Marie’s light and lilting, Marie calling out Here comes the Mouse King! to all her five-year-olds and bending her feet and hands into claws, the girls screaming with pleasure . . .

Charlie in the back office listening to parents bemoan their child’s lack of discipline, the exorbitant cost of pointe shoes, the holiday schedule, Charlie nodding patiently as mothers spoke in hushed tones about their own long-ago ballet aspirations, of the mad fantasy of tutus and rosin, satin and tulle, floodlights and beaming faces, leaping endlessly into a lover’s waiting arms.

Everything worked, nothing ever changed.

And yet gradually the Durant School of Dance, decades after opening in a former dry goods store with a drooping ceiling, had become a major success.

“I always knew it could be,” Charlie said.

Which one does your daughter have? Dara or Marie?

They look so much alike, but Dara’s dark to Marie’s fair.

They look so much alike, but Dara has the long swan neck and Marie the long colt legs.

Both carry themselves with such poise. They show our daughters grace and bearing.

They bend and twist our squirmy, pigeon-breasted little girls into lithe and lissome dancers. Our girls walk into the Durant School shrill and strident, with the clatter of phones and the slap of flip-flops, and an hour later, they have been transformed into the strong, sweated stillness of an empress, a czarina, a Durant.

Our daughters love them both, especially Marie.

Marie, because she taught the younger ones. Because she would get down on the floor with them, would fix their loose braids and, when they burst into tears, secretly give them strawberry sugar wafers. After class, she might even teach them how to do that dance like their favorite pop singer if they showed her first on their phones. At day’s end, Dara would peek into Marie’s studio, the pastel crush of wafer crumbs, the abandoned hair ribbons and bent bobby pins, and wonder if Marie understood little girls too well.

Dara followed their mother’s model. In her studio, she stood queen-like, her chin jutting like a wolf’s-that’s how Charlie described it-quick to correct, quick to unravel them, the girls with the lazy extension, the girls pirouetting with bent knees.

Someone had to keep up the tradition of rigor, of firm discipline, and it inevitably fell to Dara. Or suited her best. It was hard to tell the difference.

But, for the most part, to all the little girls, their faces upturned, their matching pink tights and scuffed leather slippers-still more to their parents who crowded the lobby, who steamed up the windows, unwrapping their children from fuzzy, puffy coats and nudging them, gently, into the studio-Dara and Marie were the same, but different.

Dara was cool, but Marie was hot.

Dara was dark, but Marie was light.

Dara and Marie, the same but different.

“Every girl wants to be a ballerina . . .”

It was always the photograph that first drew them in. Dark Dara and pale Marie, their heads tilted against each other, matching buns, their feet in relevŽ. The photograph was the first thing you saw when you walked into the studio lobby, or clicked on the website, or picked up the community circular or the sleek lifestyle magazine and saw the glossy ad in the back.

Charlie had taken the photograph and everyone talked about it.

So striking, everyone would say. E-theeeer-real, some would even venture. The littlest girls, padding in in their ballet pinks, would stare up at the photo mounted in the lobby, fingers in their mouths.

Like fairy princesses.

So Charlie took more photos. For the local paper, which featured them regularly, for their marketing materials as the school grew in size. But the photos were always, fundamentally, the same. Dark Dara and pale Marie, poised, close, touching.

Once, a marketing person offered them a free consultation. After observing them in the studio one summer day, sweating in the corner, wilting on the high stool they’d given him, he spoke to Charlie under his breath for a long time. That was how they ended up with the photo of Dara and Marie at the end of a long day, after dancing together in the quiet studio, their bodies loose, their leotards soaked through.

Charlie shot them collapsed upon each other on the floor, their faces pink with pleasure.

“Move closer,” he said from behind the camera. “Closer still.”

Closer still. Back then, it seemed impossible to be any closer. The three of them, so entwined. Charlie was Dara’s husband, but he was also so much more. Dara, Marie, and Charlie, their days spent together at the studio, their nights in their childhood home. Back then.

After the shoot, looking at images on Charlie’s computer, Dara hesitated, imagining what their mother might say of the photos, their bruises and blisters and blackened toenails hidden, their bodies so smooth and perfect and bare. “Are you sure?” she asked.

“They tell a story,” Charlie said.

“They sell a story,” Marie added, snapping her leotard against her damp skin.

Dancers have short lives, of course. What happened to Charlie-his crushing injuries, his four painful surgeries-never left their minds. His body, still as lean and marble-cut as the day their mother brought him home, was a living reminder of how quickly things could turn, how beautiful things could be all broken inside. One had to plan, to make a trajectory. That was what made Dara and Charlie different from Marie, from their parents.

Marie always seemed ready to bolt, but never for long and never far. How far could one get if one still struggled to remember a bank card pin number, and left gas burners lit wherever she went.

So, when Dara and Charlie did marry-at city hall, he in an open-collar shirt and back brace and she in a tissue-thin slip dress that made her shudder on the front steps-he brought with him a small trust fund from his long-deceased father, to be broken open at last like a platinum piggy bank on his twenty-first birthday. The amount was modest, but they used it to pay off the mortgage for the studio building, drooping ceiling and all. They owned it outright. It was theirs.

We’ll do it together, he said.

And Marie.

Of course, he said. We three. We means three.

It was the three of them. Always the three of them. Until it wasnÕt. And that was when everything went wrong. Starting with the fire. Or before.

US