Hurrah, I have convinced my beautiful and intelligent mother to write a guest post for me on Marisha Pessl’s new book Night Film. Whiskey Jenny and I discussed it on the podcast, and now you may also hear a third view, that of my mumsy. This review is certified spoiler-free.
This is what Marisha Pessl’s new novel Night Film is like: It’s like walking into your living room to find a live kangaroo in there. It’s unexpected, it’s pretty scary, it’s extremely lively and very uninhibited; it feels dangerous and destructive, and at the same time, almost comically absurd. And if you quickly close the door, and drag some Animal Control people back to your house, you are likely to find the whole familiar room unrecognizable, the windows smashed, no kangaroo in sight, and the Animal Control people having eye conversations with each other and discreetly twirling their index fingers against their temples. You will wonder if you have lost touch with reality. That’s Night Film.
Note from Jenny: That spot-on observation reminds me of this XKCD cartoon, which I cannot resist sharing because it charms me.
The story, as narrated by disgraced investigative reporter Scott McGrath, begins with the discovery of the broken body of Ashley Cordova , age 24, in an abandoned warehouse, an apparent suicide. Her father, the celebrated horror film director Stanislas Cordova, hasn’t given an interview or been seen in years, ever since a copycat murderer duplicated a gruesome murder from one of his films. His disturbing films are nonetheless still being screened in underground settings by rabid fans known as “Cordovites,” who also maintain “black sites” on the internet — sites which are only accessible to the initiated. Ash herself, “the Enchanter’s Daughter,” is the stuff of legends, a mysterious presence with uncanny gifts. In the course of his investigation of her death, Scott stumbles upon bizarre fetishistic objects, cryptic messages, purveyors of dark magic, a creepy false priest. Marisha Pessl is not shying away from the Crazy – she is piling it on faster than her hero and his allies can shovel through it.
Night Film is an illustrated novel, with generous dollops of photos, magazine interviews, mysterious webpages and newspaper articles. I was enchanted with these and wished with all my heart that there were more – seriously, I would have paid twice the price to get twice as many internet articles. I absolutely adored this aspect of the novel, and I loved the way Pessl heaped up the plot points like her story was a plate of loaded nachos. She just seemed to be having so much fun with it that even a wimpy reader like me (one who can’t watch even the campiest horror film) was swept up and enthralled with every dark turn of the author’s imagination.
I do have to say something about the italics. Scott can’t pen the simplest sentence without dramatic emphasis in the form of italics. It was weird! I kept wondering if perhaps Pessl was using the italics to send a coded message vital to the plot line. On reflection, however, I think that this constant italicization was simply another device for Pessl to convey what ultimately seemed to me the central theme of the novel: that human beings need stories in order to cope with unbearable realities, and that a very dramatic story — a story with blinding lights and pitch-black shadows — is not only the best kind, but also the kind most likely to actually become reality.
Cover report (by Jenny, not Mumsy): I initially thought the British cover was better, but now I have swung back around to preferring the American one. The British cover conveys the circles-within-circles quality of the book, but the American cover has fuzzy edges, and this is emphatically not a sharp-edged book.