Saturday, May 04, 2019

Night Film by Marisha Pessl



(hb; 2013)

From the inside flap

“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. . .”


Review

Night Film is one of my favorite reads of 2019. It is highly recommended for fans of Dario Argento, as it is a dark, funny and twisted love letter to the writer/director’s works, with its creepy imagery, symbology, and themes that read like one of Argento’s better, more disturbing works. Night’s structure, with its deeper-into-the-terrifying-labyrinth progressions and characters, also reminded me─in a better-written way─of Arturo Pérez Reverte’s novel The Club Dumas, later the basis for the 1999 Roman Polanski film The Ninth Gate

Night’s ending─perhaps a comment on the enduring permutations and perceptions of mystery and legend─may prove too low-key for some readers, but I was fine with it. This book is worth owning.

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