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Night Film: A Novel by Marisha Pessl
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Night Film: A Novel (edition 2014)

by Marisha Pessl (Author)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
3,1932844,243 (3.76)142
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR * Cosmopolitan * Kirkus Reviews * BookPage A page-turning thriller for readers of Stephen King, Gillian Flynn, and Stieg Larsson, Night Film tells the haunting story of a journalist who becomes obsessed with the mysterious death of a troubled prodigy--the daughter of an iconic, reclusive filmmaker.   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. Includes a bonus PDF of interactive images 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   "Haunting . . . a suspenseful, sprawling page-turner."--USA Today   "Entrancing and delightful . . . [a] whipsmart humdinger of a thriller . . . It feels, above all things, new."--The Boston Globe   "Gripping . . . a masterful puzzle . . . Pessl builds up real suspense."--Entertainment Weekly   "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… (more)
Member:ethorwitz
Title:Night Film: A Novel
Authors:Marisha Pessl (Author)
Info:Random House Trade Paperbacks (2014), Edition: NO-VALUE, 640 pages
Collections:Your library, Currently reading, Wishlist, To read, Read but unowned, Favorites
Rating:
Tags:to-read, horror

Work Information

Night Film by Marisha Pessl

  1. 11
    The Supernatural Enhancements by Edgar Cantero (dizzyweasel)
    dizzyweasel: Ephemera, found footage, photos, scripts add to the narrative to unfold the mystery.
  2. 00
    Hors de moi by Didier van Cauwelaert (beyondthefourthwall)
    beyondthefourthwall: Tense, twisty psychological thrillers. Just who is pulling the strings here, and why?
  3. 00
    The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert (beyondthefourthwall)
    beyondthefourthwall: Two enjoyably creepy novels featuring young people trying to figure out what's up with elderly genius recluses who may or may not be dead and whose eerie, inaccessible Upstate New York estates may or may not be supernaturally dangerous.
  4. 00
    The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone by Adele Griffin (beyondthefourthwall)
    beyondthefourthwall: Multimedia-based investigations into the mysterious, premature death of brilliant, troubled young women - in both cases, there may or may not be anything supernatural going on.
  5. 00
    As Simple As Snow by Gregory Galloway (beyondthefourthwall)
  6. 01
    The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (samalots)
  7. 01
    Bellevue Square by Michael Redhill (beyondthefourthwall)
    beyondthefourthwall: Fast-paced, clever, multilayered thrillers with an edge of horror, open to interpretation, which end up playing extensively with reliability and the nature of reality.
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» See also 142 mentions

English (276)  German (2)  French (2)  Dutch (2)  Italian (1)  Swedish (1)  Norwegian (1)  All languages (285)
Showing 1-5 of 276 (next | show all)
i wish i could erase my memory and read this for the first time again...such a fantastic mystery that creates an incredibly, unsettling tone throughout. i also LOVE a good fake media tie-in with screenshots of websites, paparazzi photos, newspaper clippings etc. to truly immerse yourself ( )
  bisexuality | Mar 6, 2024 |
This was a very atmospheric novel. Her language, imagery, and the multimedia clips created a spooky and paranoia driven world. i was disappointed with the ending. ( )
  devilhoo | Jan 3, 2024 |
Oh, how I LOVED this book. It was exactly what I needed after being in a reading slump for so long. Spellbinding, beautifully written, with amazingly vivid characters that leapt off the page. I wanted to live in this world, and when I turned the last page, I was heartbroken because I didn’t want it to end. I was a little disappointed in the ending, but I think my feelings about it had less to do with the story itself and more with the fact that I just wanted to keep reading. I would have gladly read 600 more pages about Scott, Nora, Hopper, Ashley and Cordova - not to mention the myriad walk-on roles that were at times repulsive, fascinating, and endearing. I adored NIGHT FILM. It reminded me that there are amazing books out there for me, and there’s no need to slog through the ones that don’t captivate me like this one did. ( )
  Elizabeth_Cooper | Oct 27, 2023 |
Had really high hopes, but for some reason I just couldn't get through it. ( )
  nogomu | Oct 19, 2023 |
This book was so well written!!!
I felt like I was there with the characters going through this investigation and learning things as they did. Loved it! ( )
  Danielle.Desrochers | Oct 10, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 276 (next | show all)
This book is like a big fun-house — Pessl lets you decide if you want to believe its magic. I probably won't remember all that much of the plot a few weeks from now and the characters are basically vehicles for an overarching idea more than anything else. But Marisha Pessl had an extremely cool and intricate idea for a novel, and ultimately it works. I was totally happy to sit in the darkness until the very last page, and I didn't move a muscle until the lights came up.
added by zhejw | editNPR, Meg Wolitzer (Aug 22, 2013)
 
By the time you’ve fallen halfway down this rabbit hole, the plot feels like an M.C. Escher nightmare about Edgar Allan Poe. What’s best, some of the folks whom Scott interviews tell such incantatory tales about Cordova’s grotesque antics that you’ll miss your subway stop, let dinner burn and start sleeping with the lights on.
 
Ms. Pessl seems to take it on faith that her readers will want more than the page provides. But that’s hardly guaranteed. This is a book that plods along for 500 pages without developing any momentum at all. It gathers steam only in a string of excitingly fake endings that contradict one another. Most of it is a halfhearted film noir pastiche with amusing period-piece characters (one is a perky hatcheck girl) and an array of different settings. But exploring them feels like roaming the endless domains of a video game, not like reading a book.
 

» Add other authors (10 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Pessl, Marishaprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Garton, RekhaCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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Epigraph
Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out? Do you want to know what is there or live in the dark delusion that this commercial world insists we remain sealed inside like blind caterpillars in an eternal cocoon? Will you curl up with your eyes closed and die? Or can you fight your way out of it and fly?

—Stanislas Cordova

Rolling Stone, December 29, 1977
Dedication
In memory of my grandmother,

Ruth Hunt Readinger

(1910-2011)
First words
Everyone has a Cordova story, whether they like it or not.
Quotations
...indicator of the problems of today's youth; raised by the Internet, they flitted from one fixation to the next with all the gravity of a mouse-click...
Last words
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Original language
Canonical DDC/MDS
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Wikipedia in English (3)

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR * Cosmopolitan * Kirkus Reviews * BookPage A page-turning thriller for readers of Stephen King, Gillian Flynn, and Stieg Larsson, Night Film tells the haunting story of a journalist who becomes obsessed with the mysterious death of a troubled prodigy--the daughter of an iconic, reclusive filmmaker.   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. Includes a bonus PDF of interactive images 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   "Haunting . . . a suspenseful, sprawling page-turner."--USA Today   "Entrancing and delightful . . . [a] whipsmart humdinger of a thriller . . . It feels, above all things, new."--The Boston Globe   "Gripping . . . a masterful puzzle . . . Pessl builds up real suspense."--Entertainment Weekly   "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

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Book description
Una noche húmeda de octubre, la joven Ashley Cordova aparece muerta en un almacén abandonado del Bajo Manhattan. Scott McGrath, un desacreditado periodista de investigación, sospecha que detrás de este aparente suicidio se oculta una verdad mucho más retorcida. Las extrañas circunstancias que rodearon la vida de Ashley se mezclan con el legado de un padre excéntrico: el enigmático Stanislas Cordova, un legendario director de cine de terror que ha permanecido fuera de escena durante más de treinta años y que ha conseguido convertir su vida en un secreto absoluto. Sus películas de culto están prohibidas en el circuito comercial y solo pueden ser visionadas en proyecciones clandestinas. La obsesión de McGrath con el cineasta sumergirá al investigador en un mundo profundamente hipnótico y siniestro, mientras el lector, a través de una serie de documentos, pistas y fotografías, le acompaña en la misma búsqueda obsesiva.
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