Night Film by Marisha Pessl

Night Film is a mystery thriller written by Marisha Pessl, who was born on October 26th, 1977. Before starting writing novels, Pessl worked as a financial consultant and only wrote in her free time. Nowadays she is known as an American writer and her debut novel was “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, which was published in 2006.
     The novel is about the daughter of the legendary russian reclusive horror-film director Stanislas Cordova. Her name is Ashley Cordova and she is 24 years old. Ashley was found dead in an elevator in Manhattan. The elevator was not working. Supposingly she just commits suicide. Her father, Stanislav, who was not seen in public for a while, is despised from the peope, because of his movies.
The journalist Scott McGrath thinks, that Stanislas Cordova had something to do with the death of his daughter. So he and two others are interviewing several people to crack the case. They interview people who do know both of the Cordovas. At the end they discover that truth of the mystery could have some beyond natural, scientific reasons.
     The author also uses newspaper articles and screenshots, which were printed in the book. This is a new and not very common structure of novels.
    The book leads the reader to interactivity, because there is an App which scans so called Easter-Eggs. Those Easter-Eggs are hidden all over the novel. When the reader finds an Easter-Egg and scans it with the App, he will get a lot of extra information, about the story. Those added information gives the reader a whole new view about what he just read. 

K-R. Pekgüven

Night Film by Marisha Pessl

Marisha Pessl (*October 26, 1977) is an American novelist, who started working as a financial consultant and just wrote in her free time. Her first novel “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, published in 2006, almost exclusively got good reviews and criticism (especially in US-American literature criticism). Her second novel “Night Film” (2013) features some interesting structural peculiarities.
     The novel is a mystery thriller and as well as her first novel, a New York Times bestseller. It is about the young Ashley Cordover (24), who was found dead in a not working elevator in Manhattan warehouse. Her dead was ruled a suicide. Her father is the cult-horror-film director Stanislas Cordova, who hasn’t been seen in public for 30 years. He is a mysterious man who is despised by many people because of his harrowing movies. The Journalist Scott McGrath wants to investigate the death of Ashley Cordova with the help of two acquaintances of Ashley, Nora and Hopper, because he beliefs that there is lying more behind her death and Stanislas Cordova. McGrath’s life took a turn for the worse during his first researches about Cordova, this time he could lose his mind.
     The structural peculiarities of this book are its connections to the material McGrath is researching in and its interactivity with the reader. On one hand this book offers next to the normal text some experts and details of the things the figures in the book are looking at. These are excerpts of telephone books, letters, text message-chats, photos or magazines. By these little images, the reader can have a look at the material by his- or herself. Moreover, Pessl included some screenshots of author created web pages. There are many pages of this book which just contain web pages, belonging to the story (for example online blogs or a web page of Cordova votaries), which Pessl invented all by herself. On the other hand, Pessl published an app, the “Night Film Decoder” app belonging to this book  On some pages the reader can find an image of a bird, which Pessl calls Ester eggs. If the reader scans these images with the Night Film Decoder app, it unlocks additional texts, PDFs, videos and audio files by which the reader can get deeper insights into the story.
     Some reviews of the connection of this book and the app claim the interactivity as a distraction. They state that the reading experience would be interrupted too often and that the app and the technical device, the mobile telephone, lead the reader to lacking of concentration. Supporter however state that the huge amount of information keeps the reader interested, that the search of these Easter eggs is entertaining and that this interactivity intensifies the reading experience instead of distracting it. Pessl explained, that she mentioned the app at the end of the novel, because she wants the reader to read though the novel without getting interrupted and use the app afterwards to have a closer look at some details. 

S. Lamouchi