Book: Night Film

Night Film is the kind of book I wish I could write, not because it's the greatest thing I've ever read--I've got a few issues both with Pessl's style (who uses that many italics for no particular reason?) and with the content of the novel (at times McGrath is such an idiot as a narrator that I can't tell if it's bad writing or just a particular way of playing up a character's shortcomings). Rather, I fell for the book from the moment I read its jacket because it seems to create such a nice blend of so many of my favorite things: film, literary fiction, horror, noir, and more. Pessl has a ton of fun throwing everything at the wall and allowing us--and McGrath--to decide what is going to stick: is this a ghost story? A tale of witchcraft? Devil worship? Abuse? Something else entirely? It's not clear, until it is, and then it isn't again, which is a pretty great trick to pull off.

As I said, that doesn't make it perfect. I'm not sure I ever like McGrath--his motivations are always selfishly myopic (especially for someone who was as successful as a reporter as Pessl makes him), and his sidekicks are obtuse and obnoxious and a little bit too quirky to feel real. The story itself veers into camp a few times and loses the nice sense of suspense she builds for most of the novel.

For me, however, those types of minor issues are easily outweighed by the pleasure I got from reading the book. Pessl makes the book unusually multimedia heavy (you can even download an app and use it to enhance various parts of the novel, though I didn't do that myself), featuring magazine articles and covers, web pages, newspaper clippings, and more throughout the text. Though those elements didn't always feel natural, it wasn't nearly as awkward as, say, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children's use of photographs; instead it enriched the text and made it feel more like pieces of a life, which seems to be exactly what she was going for. 

Most impressively, I think Pessl does a pretty fine job creating a sense of foreboding and dread. Her reclusive filmmaker, Stanislas Cordova, is always hovering on the edges of the text, never quite clear in terms of purpose or role or goals, always changing from one thing to another (reclusive genius? evil madman? loving father? satanic murderer?), and so the inability to draw a definite outline around him makes him a figure of fear, a bogeyman who is never quite seen except out of the corner of your eye. It really works, as do her descriptions of his films. They come across as a product of some kind of Polanski/Kubrick/Lynch blend that plums the darkest parts of our hearts and so hints at some darkness in the filmmaker's own life. I couldn't help but thinking of films like Repulsion where that line between sanity and insanity seems to increasingly blur, and even without showing us a lot of blood or guts we can be horrified and frightened. Cordova's films seem to function in a similar way.

I don't think it's the best book of the year--I haven't read enough from the year to make that proclamation, but even if I had there are enough rough patches here to make me question it from a literary standpoint. But it is still one of my favorite reads of the year. A great book to read next to a dark window on a cold night.