Night Film - Marisha Pessl (Book Review)

 

 

Reading Night Film by Marisha Pessl is more an experience than just a read. I have not read such an atmospheric novel in quite a long time. This one really took me away to a place and time and feeling I haven't enjoyed in quite some time. This book would have to be in my top ten reads of the whole year.

...Everyone has a Cordova story, whether they like it or not.
Maybe your next-door neighbor found one of his movies in an old box in her attic and never entered a dark room alone again. Or your boyfriend bragged he'd discovered a contraband copy of At Night All Birds Are Black on the Internet and after watching refused to speak of it, as if it were a horrific ordeal he'd barely survived...

The novel tells the tale of the death of Ashley Cordova, daughter to famed and eccentric film director Stanislas Cordova at the age of 24. Ashley committed suicide and her death is the catalyst that sends the other characters into a hunt for the truth behind her act. Disgraced reporter Scott McGrath whose expose on Cordova ending up destroying his own career finds himself once again chasing down the enigma that is Cordova.

...Even thought I was firmly not a believer in the paranormal, there was still the nagging remembrance of how Ashley had appeared the night at the reservoir. I hadn't told Nora about it. I hadn't told anyone. The truth was, I was no longer certain of what I'd seen. It was as if that night could be separated from all the others as a night without logic, a night of fantasy and strangeness, born of my own lonely delusions, a night that had no place in the real world...

McGrath and his team dig deep into the world of Cordova and find unexplained death and missing persons and legend upon legend of the dark director piled upon one another. There is mystery and fantasy and McGrath struggles to separate the two. Is there something truly sinister about Cordova as he has always believed? Are the tales of witchcraft and rituals done on Cordova's estate The Peak true. The stories that all of Cordova's films were done sequestered on his estate and that no actors that worked there were ever the same again.

..."Darkness. I know it's hard to fathom today, but a true artist needs darkness in order to create. It gives him power. His invisibility. The less the world knows about him, his whereabouts, his origins and secret methods, the more strength he has..."

For every stone McGrath turns over he finds himself deeper and deeper the in the darkness that is Stanislas Cordova. And what of Ashley? Who's suicide spurred the investigation. She, like her father, is layers and layers of secrets and magic. Is the dark magic she possessed real. Why did she inspire such love and fear in all that met her. Had she been destroyed or protected by her father. Which of the two was the real monster. Or is the truth something more real and more terrifying than all the dark fantasy McGrath can dig up about Cordova?

...She eyed me disdainfully. "You've done a lifetime's worth of mining, Mr. McGrath. Maybe it's time to come back to the surface and go home with whatever lumps of coal you've managed to dig loose."

And just like that reader, you realize that along with McGrath you too have been reading this book just underwater with the surface right above you. Will you continue or will you come up from air? For it is here that you realize how deeply you've have stepped into the world of Stanislas Cordova, the Night Film and Marisha Pessl.

Very well done.