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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Aug 2013, 624 pages
Paperback:
Jul 2014, 624 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Poornima Apte
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Brilliant, haunting, breathtakingly suspenseful, Night Film is a superb literary thriller by the New York Times bestselling author of the blockbuster debut Special Topics in Calamity Physics.
On a damp October night, the body of young, beautiful Ashley Cordova is found in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. By all appearances her death is a suicide - but investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise. Though much has been written about the dark and unsettling films of Ashley's father, Stanislas Cordova, very little is known about the man himself. As McGrath pieces together the mystery of Ashley's death, he is drawn deeper and deeper into the dark underbelly of New York City and the twisted world of Stanislas Cordova, and he begins to wonder - is he the next victim?
In this novel, the dazzlingly inventive writer Marisha Pessl offers a breathtaking mystery that will hold you in suspense until the last page is turned.
PROLOGUE
New York City 2:32 A.M.
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.
Whatever your opinion of Cordova, however obsessed with his work or indifferent—he's there to react against. He's a crevice, a black hole, an unspecified danger, a relentless outbreak of the unknown in our overexposed world. He's underground, looming unseen in the corners of the dark. He's down under the railway bridge in the river with all the missing evidence, and the answers that will never see the light of day.
He's a myth, a monster, a mortal man.
And yet I can't help but believe when you need him the most, ...
Pessl’s beautiful, haunting imagery and vivid writing completely pull you in and you emerge breathless. She makes you lose sight of the trees for the forest - the eerily creepy forest. Already famous for her literary pyrotechnics with her debut, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Pessl showcases her immense talent again...continued
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(Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
In Night Film, Marisha Pessl seems to take inspiration from a number of movie directors including Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick but the one whom the fictional Stan Cordova resembles the most is David Lynch.
Born in 1946 in Missoula, Montana to middle-class parents, Lynch had an itinerant childhood moving from state to state before finally graduating from high school pretty unremarkably, in Virginia. By this time, Lynch was quite interested in the arts and decided to pursue painting at the school of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He dropped out in short order eventually taking up schooling again in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which is where he first experimented with film using a series of clips of ...
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