Marisha Pessl’s bestselling debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize (now the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize), and was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. Pessl grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and currently resides in New York City.
Night Film
Paperback
- ISBN-13: 9780812979787
- Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
- Publication date: 07/01/2014
- Pages: 640
- Sales rank: 23,323
- Product dimensions: 5.60(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)
Choose Expedited Delivery at checkout for delivery by. Tuesday, October 15
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
NPR • Cosmopolitan • Kirkus Reviews • BookPage
A page-turning thriller for readers of Stephen King, Gillian Flynn, and Stieg Larsson, Night Film tells the haunting story of a journalist who becomes obsessed with the mysterious death of a troubled prodigy—the daughter of an iconic, reclusive filmmaker.
On a damp October night, beautiful young Ashley Cordova is found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. Though her death is ruled a suicide, veteran investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise. As he probes the strange circumstances surrounding Ashley’s life and death, McGrath comes face-to-face with the legacy of her father: the legendary, reclusive cult-horror-film director Stanislas Cordova—a man who hasn’t been seen in public for more than thirty years.
For McGrath, another death connected to this seemingly cursed family dynasty seems more than just a coincidence. Though much has been written about Cordova’s dark and unsettling films, very little is known about the man himself.
Driven by revenge, curiosity, and a need for the truth, McGrath, with the aid of two strangers, is drawn deeper and deeper into Cordova’s eerie, hypnotic world.
The last time he got close to exposing the director, McGrath lost his marriage and his career. This time he might lose even more.
Night Film, the gorgeously written, spellbinding new novel by the dazzlingly inventive Marisha Pessl, will hold you in suspense until you turn the final page.
Praise for Night Film
“Night Film has been precision-engineered to be read at high velocity, and its energy would be the envy of any summer blockbuster. Your average writer of thrillers should lust for Pessl’s deft touch with character.”—Joe Hill, The New York Times Book Review
“Mysterious and even a little head-spinning, an amazing act of imagination.”—Dean Baquet, The New York Times Book Review
“Maniacally clever . . . Cordova is a monomaniacal genius who creeps into the darkest crevices of the human psyche. . . . As a study of a great mythmaker, Night Film is an absorbing act of myth-making itself. . . . Dastardly fun . . . The plot feels like an M. C. Escher nightmare about Edgar Allan Poe. . . . You’ll miss your subway stop, let dinner burn and start sleeping with the lights on.”—The Washington Post
“Haunting . . . a suspenseful, sprawling page-turner.”—USA Today
“Entrancing and delightful . . . [a] whipsmart humdinger of a thriller . . . It feels, above all things, new.”—The Boston Globe
“Gripping . . . a masterful puzzle . . . Pessl builds up real suspense.”—Entertainment Weekly
“A very deeply imagined book . . . sprints to an ending that’s equal parts nagging and haunting: What lingers, beyond all the page-turning, is a density of possible clues that leaves you leafing backward, scanning fictional blog comments and newspaper clippings, positive there’s some secret detail that will snap everything into focus.”—New York
“Hypnotic . . . The real and the imaginary, life and art, are dizzyingly distorted not only in a Cordova night film . . . but in Pessl’s own Night Film as well.”—Vanity Fair
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Night Film's narrator is Scott McGrath, a New York City–based investigative reporter who was sued for defamation in 2006 while probing too closely into the activities of a reclusive, Oscar-winning director named Stanislas Cordova. In the wake of the lawsuit, McGrath's marriage went kerflooey, his high-flying career tanked, and he's been left to brood in his Perry Street apartment, alone with his memories and a forlorn movie poster of Alain Delon on his office wall.
Cut to October 2011, with breaking news that Cordova's beautiful twenty-four-year-old daughter, Ashley, has been found dead in the elevator shaft of an empty Chinatown warehouse. Was it suicide or murder? Was she troubled by inner demons, assaulted by someone she knew, or stalked by strangers? And how involved was her father, the sinister, shadowy Cordova a grand master of horror flicks, notorious for blurring the line between appearance and reality? Intrigued, McGrath grabs the opportunity to restore his reputation by pursuing the case. Along the way, he picks up two helpful young sidekicks: a nineteen-year-old coat-check girl named Nora and Hopper, a small-time drug dealer with a heart of gold and a vague personal history that just might have included an association with Ashley Cordova.
A brash stylistic maneuver energizes the novel's opening pages, in which Pessl presents facts about Ashley's life and death through a series of website simulations, newspaper and magazine clippings, and other realistic-looking documents. In a faux NewYorkTimes.com article, Ashley (or, more accurately, an uncredited stand-in for her) stares challengingly in an accompanying photo, looking a bit like a sulkier young Amanda Peet, while a Time.com slideshow clicks through the particulars of Stanislas Cordova's life, including his three ex-wives and the 300- acre Adirondacks estate that has been his home since 1976 and has served as the location for most of his films.
It's not the content of these simulations that feels new here: some of it's cheesy, and all of it looks conventional. Instead, what's revelatory is the way it draws the reader into the story, precisely mimicking the way one would conduct an Internet search if Cordova actually existed, and thus making the reader complicit with McGrath in searching for clues to Ashley's death. Even more clever is the fact that some of the more fawning profiles of Ashley a page from the Amherst College newsletter, for example, which slobbers over her teenage years as a piano prodigy recall the amped-up media attention Pessl herself received when her first novel was published in 2006. Cheeky, playful, meta, twee: love it or hate it, this apprehension of our current moment at least as it exists for the readers most likely to pick up this book is as accurate as any contemporary novel could hope to be.
Pessl more or less abandons the visual aids about halfway through the narrative, but she sustains the atmosphere of ceaseless replication in other ways. Everything here, in fact, is a hologram, a spectral presence that purposefully suggests a thousand other things. (Not for nothing is Pessl's favorite figure of speech the simile, comparing like with like: the simile for her is as the footnote was for David Foster Wallace, a signature and a manifesto.) Cordova recalls a bit of Kubrick and Polanski here, a touch of David Cronenberg and Karl Atticus there. His creepy sprawling estate, called The Peak, brings to mind The Shining and Mark Z. Danielewski's alt-novel House of Leaves. There's a nefarious priest straight out of The Exorcist, sophisticated Manhattan witches like those in Rosemary's Baby, a high-end secret sex club like the one in Eyes Wide Shut, ash circles and weird piles of twigs borrowed from The Blair Witch Project, and on and on. Ominous totems are everywhere. Ashley's red coat, "that blood red stitch in the night," tries to conjure the same fear as the red plastic raincoat in Don't Look Now, while other portents include a compass, a locked box, a disfigured baby doll, a man's herringbone jacket, a child's bloody shirt.
Night Film, as these lists suggest, is all MacGuffins and no Jimmy Stewart. Scott McGrath isn't a credible enough tour guide through this world: he's slick and flat as a pop-up ad, and other key figures in the book sound too much like him. We follow him down a lot of random roads both urban and rural, some of them imaginatively atmospheric, but none of them particularly scary or thrilling. For a story about the titillations of horror, this has virtually none. It's too episodic to maintain any suspense, and there is, even in the secret sex club, zero sex.
But I don't believe that Pessl set out to satisfy the conventions of a traditional novel, and so to argue the effectiveness here of character or plot is to miss the point of the book. I think Pessl is setting up a mirror to show us our distracted, entertainment-drunk culture, where there's a precedent for every pop-culture reference, an information link for every personality, an Echo for every Narcissus. She's blithely unconcerned, as she was in her first novel, with any suggestion of depth. Speed and volume are her articles of faith, as they must be ours. "Life was a freight train barreling toward just one stop, our loved ones streaking past our windows in blurs of color and light," McGrath intones at the novel's end, with a timeless cinematic flourish. "There was no holding on to any of it, and no slowing it down."
Donna Rifkind's reviews appear frequently in The Washington Post Book World and the Los Angeles Times. She has also been a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, The American Scholar, and other publications. In 2006, she was a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.
Reviewer: Donna Rifkind
“Mysterious and even a little head-spinning, an amazing act of imagination.”—Dean Baquet, The New York Times Book Review
“Maniacally clever . . . Cordova is a monomaniacal genius who creeps into the darkest crevices of the human psyche. . . . As a study of a great mythmaker, Night Film is an absorbing act of myth-making itself. . . . Dastardly fun . . . The plot feels like an M. C. Escher nightmare about Edgar Allan Poe. . . . You’ll miss your subway stop, let dinner burn and start sleeping with the lights on.”—The Washington Post
“Haunting . . . a suspenseful, sprawling page-turner.”—USA Today
“Entrancing and delightful . . . [a] whipsmart humdinger of a thriller . . . It feels, above all things, new.”—The Boston Globe
“Gripping . . . a masterful puzzle . . . Pessl builds up real suspense.”—Entertainment Weekly
“A very deeply imagined book . . . sprints to an ending that’s equal parts nagging and haunting: What lingers, beyond all the page-turning, is a density of possible clues that leaves you leafing backward, scanning fictional blog comments and newspaper clippings, positive there’s some secret detail that will snap everything into focus.”—New York
“Hypnotic . . . The real and the imaginary, life and art, are dizzyingly distorted not only in a Cordova night film . . . but in Pessl’s own Night Film as well.”—Vanity Fair
“A literary mystery that’s also a page-turner . . . Night Film might be the most talked-about novel this summer.”—Time Out New York
“Noirish, impish and stylish, this literary thriller delivers twists, kinks and characters to care about. . . . Night Film gets two thumbs up.”—More
“You won’t put this book down.”—Marie Claire
“A shrewdly contemporary whodunit.”—W Magazine
“The sort of a top-shelf whodunit that thriller buffs dream of. Seriously, people, this is the Game of Thrones of murder mysteries.”—Out
“Night Film is an engrossing yarn, full of twists and cliffhangers. . . . Pessl handles Cordova’s menace superbly, keeping readers in thrall.”—The Economist
“It may be true, as the opening scene of the novel says, that everybody has a story about Cordova. But it’s hard to imagine any one that would be better than Night Film.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Screenshots of online news articles and the Cordovite fansite, as well as copies of mental hospital patient assessment forms and other official documents—all fictional—plus McGrath’s terror-filled imagination, pull the reader into Pessl’s masterfully played ruse. Pessl has matured into a cleverly entertaining writer who wields her strengths with greater precision than in Special Topics.”—The Kansas City Star
“A gothic thriller that’s among the best novels I’ve read this year.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Having finished Night Film, I now find myself a dedicated Cordovite.”—Rob Brunner, The New York Times Magazine
“A testament to Pessl’s tremendous gifts as a storyteller.”—Scott Smith, author of The Ruins
“A rare and wonderful thing—an ambitious novel that hits its target fair and square. Night Film is beautifully imagined, beautifully written, and hypnotically suspenseful.”—Lee Child, author of A Wanted Man
“This summer’s Gone Girl: a completely absorbing literary thriller.”—Library Journal
“Inventive . . . Think Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King meet Guillermo del Toro.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Seven years after Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Pessl returns with a novel as twisted and intelligent as that lauded debut.”—Publishers Weekly
“Expands from a seemingly straightforward mystery into a multifaceted, densely byzantine exploration of much larger issues.”—Booklist (starred review)