Night Film, mystery thriller, Marisha Pessl, Random House, novel, Shirley Jackson Award, The New York Times Bestseller’s list , bookcover, bookcoverdesign, bookcoverchallenge, book, bookstagram, graphicdesign, booklist, bookreview, reviews, literat

BOOK 225: NIGHT FILM: MARISHA PESSL

On a damp October night, 24-year-old 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 Stanislaus 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.

(From Goodreads)

MY VERDICT:

I was very disappointed by this book. I read it based on many glowing reviews and I just found it dull. It was the very opposite of a page turner. The idea of an underground horror movie director with a mystery at its core seemed to be right up my ally, unfortunately none of the story lives up to the idea behind it. A typical detective style mystery but without any real intrigue – there’s moments of interest and horror – people bursting into flames and an old movie starlet with a story and a past, spells of protection and the such but the characters are not even a little real, I don’t believe a single part of them and like some reviews I have read state – they all speak in the same way, a serious flaw. I wanted to like it but I didn’t.

I want to tell you something in this review in case I mention it at a later date about my reading habits. If it interests you at all - which it might not, in which case ignore me.

If you’re still reading then I will tell you that what I tend to do is read one fiction book and then a non-fiction book. Because I love both and it gives variety to my life. Unrelated but also a rule – I never tend to read multiple books by the same author (of course I have broken this rule for the likes of both Murikami’s and Mary Roach but I’m not the kind of person to get into a series of books.) I don’t tend to read more than one book at a time except in one situation. That is why sometimes I have what I like to call a ‘Bath Book.’ A Bath Book is when the book I’m reading is an ebook on my phone, when I have a bath I like to read but I don’t like to take the phone in with me because I am clumsy and 100% will drop it in the bath, so on these occasions I will have a different physical book which I exclusively read in the bath. Am I crazy or does anyone else do this? Sometimes I finish the ebook and the bath book becomes the main book. That’s what happened in this case – so it took me a while to read, but it also took me a while to read because it didn’t keep my interest. I could literally put it down after five minutes in the middle of an ‘action’ scene or in the middle of a cliffhanger, I really couldn’t care less.