Into the dark

When a mystery or suspense novel opens with a suicide, you know it will soon be discovered to have been a murder. Not so in Marisha Pessl’s Night Film, where the suicide of lovely and mysterious Ashley Cordova really is a suicide. The investigation launched by freelance journalist Scott McGrath is aimed more at answering the question why than the question how.

McGrath suspects the young woman’s father must somehow be responsible. Legendary film director Stanislas Cordova has long been the target of his reporting. Cordova made a series of horror films, now favorites of an underground cult, but McGrath has long thought that not all the horror was fake or recorded on film. His reporting has gotten him in trouble in the past, jeopardizing his career, yet he still thinks he was right and that now he may be able to get the goods on Cordova.

The reporter is soon joined by two unwanted and unlikely assistants. Nora, an aspiring actress, was among the last people to see Ashley alive. Hopper once went to camp with her and, it turns out, was her boyfriend. Soon the pair prove to be indispensable and are the novel’s most interesting characters.

The investigation keeps descending into darker and darker territory, not unlike one of Cordova’s films. There’s black magic. There are disappearing witnesses. There is a late-night visit to the Cordova estate where he made those movies and where the sets remain just as they were seen on film.

This 2013 novel’s greatest claim to fame is that Pessl illustrates it with page after page of things mentioned in the text, newspaper and magazine articles, photographs, websites, police reports, etc. All this gives the story the appearance of reality, even as it gradually descends into unreality. The last half of the novel doesn’t live up to the expectations promised by the first half.