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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“Jake Weber is an inspired choice tonarrate Marisha Pessl’s dark and utterly addictive new novel. He is at home inthe noir, able to treat it as if the nightmarish confusion in which protagonistScott McGrath finds himself is utterly real to him—and to make it real to you.Weber’s pacing is impeccable, his characters distinguished so subtly that youcan’t even say how you knew that was, for example, Hopper speaking, but youunfailingly do know. Pessl’s plotting is intricate and gripping as McGrath ishelplessly compelled to pursue the truth about the ‘suicide’ of Ashley Cordova,gifted daughter of a maker of cult horror films, who may be just eccentricallyprivate, or maliciously manipulative, or actually demonic. Trust me: You’llcare. Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award.”
— AudioFile
“Beautifully imagined, beautifully written, and hypnotically suspenseful.”
— Lee Child, # 1 New York Times bestselling author“A testament to Marisha Pessl’s tremendous gifts as a storyteller.”
— Scott Smith, New York Times bestselling author“Get ready to talk about this book.”
— Entertainment Weekly“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“Noirish, impish, and stylish, this literary thriller delivers twists, kinks, and characters to care about…Night Film gets two thumbs up.”
— More“Your average writer of thrillers should lust for Pessl’s deft touch with character.”
— New York Times Book Review“Night Film is an engrossing yarn, full of twists and cliffhangers…Pessl handles Cordova’s menace superbly, keeping readers in thrall.”
— Economist“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.”
— Washington Post“If there’s any justice, the first chapter of literary wunderkind Marisha Pessl’s much-awaited second novel, Night Film, should go down in literary history as among the most notable formal innovations of this century…Here she conjures an entire oeuvre, as well as its production, reception, and mediation. But her biggest triumph is the specter of Cordova himself. ‘He’s a myth, a monster, a mortal man,’ she writes. One who, by the book’s end, many readers will wish desperately was real.”
— Boston Globe“It may be true, as the opening scene of the novel says, that everybody has a story about Cordova. But it’s hard to imagine any one that would be better than Night Film.”
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch“A gothic thriller that’s among the best novels I’ve read this year.”
— Milwaukee Journal Sentinel“Expands from a seemingly straightforward mystery into a multifaceted, densely byzantine exploration of much larger issues.”
— Booklist (starred review)“An inventive—if brooding, strange and creepy—adventure in literary terror. Think Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King meet Guillermo del Toro as channeled by Klaus Kinski.”
— Kirkus ReviewsBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Marisha Pessl’s bestselling debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize and was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review. She grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and currently resides in New York City.
Jake Weber was born in London, the son of a British socialite and a race car driver. He is best known for his role as Michael in Dawn of the Dead and as Drew in Meet Joe Black. He plays Joe DuBois, husband of medium/psychic, Allison DuBois, in the popular television show Medium. He was also a regular on HBO’s The Mind of the Married Man, and has made appearances on Law & Order: Criminal Intent and NYPD Blue.