NEW YORK
TIMES BESTSELLER
Brilliant,
haunting, breathtakingly suspenseful, Night Film is a superb literary thriller
by the author of the blockbuster debut Special Topics in Calamity Physics.
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
“If
there’s any justice, the first chapter of literary wunderkind Marisha Pessl’s
much-awaited second novel, Night Film, should go down in literary history as
among the most notable formal innovations of this century. . . . Here she
conjures an entire oeuvre, as well as its production, reception, and mediation.
But her biggest triumph is the specter of Cordova himself. ‘He’s a myth, a
monster, a mortal man,’ she writes. One who, by the book’s end, many readers
will wish desperately was real.”—The Boston Globe
“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
“You won’t
put this book down.”—Marie Claire
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