I haven't read Pessl's much-beloved debut, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, but after reading this dazzling and fantastic thriller, I'm eager to read more of her work, even if it's not the thrill ride that this one is. And make no mistake about it - Night Film is a pure thriller, one that's not afraid to plunge into horror territory without warning and without promise that it's going to back out or that annoying sense of superiority that so often comes with literary authors and the genre. Trying to explain the labyrinthine (but never, to Pessl's credit, confusing) plot here is difficult - it's enough to say that it involves a reclusive horror director whose films that become the stuff of legend, the disgraced newspaper writer who ruined his own life trying to take him on, and the director's daughter, who's found dead of an apparent suicide. Pessl strings those elements together beautifully, and by the book's end, we've plunged into a madhouse of witchcraft, demonic worship, psychological mindgames, hidden identities, nightmarish visions, paranoid nightmares, and the cost of obsession. What makes Night Film work, though, is the care that Pessl brings to her characters; while McGrath and much of the book's supporting cast could easily end up being stock characters, Pessl does a nice job of making us care about them and their struggles, to the point where our investment in the mystery is every bit as much because of their passion as it is our own intrigue. It's true, as some have argued, that the ending is a bit flat, but I think it's almost intentionally so - indeed, I'd almost prefer the ending without the "epilogue" of sorts that rounds out the novel and seems to hint at much more, simply for the ideas it seems to bring into the picture. But even with that slight misstep, I can't complain too much about Night Film, which I was absolutely addicted to on every page, and had me staying up way too late and spending far too much time reading it instead of doing other things. Yes, Pessl's italics are a little distracting; yes, the eventual answer isn't as interesting as the search. But that journey to the ending is a knockout, and culminates in one of the most surreal, unnerving, and just plain fantastic stretches of any thriller in recent memory. So yeah, you can count me as a big, big fan of this one - I loved its horror nods, its love of cult cinema, its multimedia aspects, all of it, and it's got me eager to see where Pessl began and where she goes from here.
-Josh Mauthe
-Josh Mauthe
