I remember hearing about this book around the same time I heard about the Six Stories series. And as you know, I got swept up in Six Stories and didn’t get around to Night Film until very recently. Honestly, this book had a really long time before the payoff but whew, what a ride it was.

Slight discussion of the ending, though not the specifics, so skip my review if you wanted to read this but don’t want it spoiled.

Night Film is a monster of a book at 118 chapters and 1044 pages on my kobo (but a more manageable 640 pages on paper, if Amazon is right). It’s also a monster of a book in that it’s a book about maybe hunting monsters. Scott McGrath, a disgraced journalists, gets pulled back into the case that ruined his career when the body of Ashley Cordova is found. Her father, Stanislas Cordova, is a cult film maker known for his increasingly dark horror films – the night films of the title. Along the way, Scott teams up with Nora (the girl who saw Ashley before her death) and Hopper (a drug dealer who knew Ashley) and the three of them find themselves in an increasingly strange world as they get closer to the truth.

My big issue with this book was the pacing. I think around a third of the way in, the story started feeling very long and we were uncovering details without any meaning. The book dragged, in places, and that’s really tempted me to DNF at times. But oddly enough, I did not stop reading and towards the end, I was pretty much hooked and I didn’t really care about what the truth way; Scott was undergoing his journey and that experience was enough. What is the truth behind Ashley Cordova’s death? Who is Stanislas Cordova? That started to get increasingly unimportant, which was good because the ending has no real solution. There is a theory, but it doesn’t explain the whole puzzle. If I was invested in the story as a mystery, I would be annoyed but somehow, I wasn’t. There was one section that was just so strange that it felt climatic and I didn’t feel the need to get to the bottom of every single detail.

In terms of characters, the book is dominated by Scott since it’s his POV that we’re getting. I was fairly ambivalent about him at the start, since he seemed to be more concerned about himself than anything, but I was fine with him by the end.

What I liked about the book was the use of different narrative devices – there are articles, interviews, website posts mixed in with Scott’s POV chapters. I saw there’s more if you look for certain symbols which I think is a rather fun idea. I would have liked for Pessl to add in IMDB summaries of all the Cordova movies somewhere since she’s already mixing in articles and blogposts, because I as the reader didn’t have Scott’s seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of Cordova’s films and I would have liked to have a reference to all of them.

To be honest, I’m not sure if I would recommend this book. I found myself really absorbed by it towards the end, but it is a slow start and those who are getting into this as a mystery might not like that some questions are left unanswered. But as an exploration of what is real and what is fake, this book does a great job bringing you inside the head of one man as he starts to question everything.

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