Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | SCD FICTION PES 19 DISCS | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | SCD FICTION PES 19 DISCS | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"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.
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"
"From the Hardcover edition.""
Author Notes
Marisha Pessl 's bestselling debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize (now the Center for Fiction's Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize), and was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review . Pessl grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and currently resides in New York City.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Seven years after Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Pessl returns with a novel as twisted and intelligent as that lauded debut. Again, the story centers on a father-daughter relationship, but this time the sinister element is front and center, beginning with the daughter's death. The "night films" of Stanislas Cordova have a cult following: fans hold underground screenings and claim that to see his work is to "leave your old self behind, walk through hell, and be reborn." Ashley Cordova is his enigmatic daughter; she appears in his final film at the age of eight, debuts as a pianist at Carnegie Hall at 12, and apparently commits suicide at 24. Scott McGrath is a reporter who lost his job investigating Stanislas and can't resist his need to uncover the real story of Ashley's death. Though the structure is classic noir, Pessl delivers lifelike horror with glimpses, in the form of faux Web sites, of the secretive Stanislas, his films, and his fans. Things slow down when Scott breaks into Stanislas's estate; sustained terror depends on what is withheld, not what is shown. But Pessl does wonderful work giving the hard-headed Scott reason to question the cause of Ashley's death, and readers will be torn between logic and magic. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* When the daughter of a notorious film director is found dead in New York, an apparent suicide, investigative reporter Scott McGrath throws himself back into a story that almost ended his career. But now McGrath has his Rosebud, and like Jedediah Leland in Citizen Kane, who hoped to make sense of media mogul Charles Foster Kane by understanding his last word, so the reporter sets out to determine how Ashley Cordova died and, in so doing, penetrate the heart of darkness that engulfs her reclusive father, Stanislas. Like Pessl's first novel, the acclaimed Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006), this one expands from a seemingly straightforward mystery into a multifaceted, densely byzantine exploration of much larger issues, in this case, the nature of truth and illusion as reflected by the elusive Cordova, whose transcend-the-genre horror films are cult favorites and about whom rumors of black magic and child abuse continue to swirl. His daughter, piano prodigy Ashley (her notes weren't played; they were poured from a Grecian urn ), is almost as mysterious as her father, her life and death equally clouded in secrecy and colored with possibly supernatural shadings. Into this mazelike world of dead ends and false leads, McGrath ventures with his two, much younger helpers, Nora and Hopper, brilliantly portrayed Holmesian irregulars who may finally understand more about Ashley than their mentor, whose linear approach to fact finding might miss the point entirely. Pessl's first novel, while undeniably impressive, possessed some of the overindulgence one might expect from a talented and precocious young writer. All evidence of that is gone here; the book is every bit as complex as Calamity Physics, but the writing is always under control, and the characters never fail to draw us further into the maelstrom of the story.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A group of investigators pursues a horror auteur known for shunning the public eye. THE true believers come out at night. They meet in condemned buildings marked by the symbol of a stylized eye to watch a "night film" - one of the psychologically punishing horror pictures of Stanislas Cordova , a master filmmaker who has shunned publicity with a zeal that makes Thomas Pynchon look like a shameless attention hog. Adding to the mystique is a sense that Cordova might have retreated because he has something unsavory to hide. Bad things happen to those who try to pick his locked closet for a look at the skeletons. Consider the star reporter Scott McGrath , who plunged into disgrace after a preliminary investigation into Cordova's secrets blew up in his face . McGrath has a score to settle, so when Cordova's achingly gifted daughter turns up dead in a Manhattan ruin , it's Take 2 for the unemployed journalist. Nor is Mc- Grath the only one who wants to know what's been going on behind the camera; in short order he's joined by a shabby but smoldering drug dealer named Hopper and a breathless ingénue, Nora Halliday . Together, the three make an adorably awkward family of misfits, who will be even more appealing should George Clooney , Ryan Gosling and Alison Brie be cast for the movie adaptation. No one can accuse Marisha Pessl of unfamiliarity with the tools of the modern thriller. With pages of faked-up old photos , invented Web sites and satellite maps , "Night Film" - Pessl's second novel, following "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" (2006) - asserts itself as a multimedia presentation more than an oldfashioned book. There are over a hundred chapters , most of the James Patterson two-page variety , a technique that adds a giddy accelerant to Pessl's already zippy pacing. She also italicizes two or three sentences a page , an insecure tic like a child poking you in the ribs to ask if you're paying attention. Unfortunately, all those italics serve to draw the reader's notice to exactly the wrong sort of lines, clunkers like "It was too quiet" and "Had I just sealed myself inside my own coffin?" Pessl is capable of fine prose, so her willingness to serve up "Hardy Boys" nuggets like these suggests she's willfully dumbing herself down. Still and all, "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 defttouch with character. Here's McGrath on his ex-wife: "When I met Cynthia our sophomore year at the University of Michigan, she was flighty and poor, a French studies major who quoted Simone de Beauvoir. She wiped her runny nose on her coat sleeve when it was snowing, stuck her head out of car windows the way dogs do, the wind fireworking her hair. That woman was gone now. Not that it was her fault. Vast fortunes did that to people. It took them to the cleaners, cruelly starched and steampressed them so all their raw edges, all the dirt and hunger and guileless laughter, were ironed out. Few survived real money." Cordova himself - a dark riffon Kubrick , with a pinch of Friedkin and a sprig of Banksy thrown in for good measure - stays offstage, casting his long, creepy shadow across the actors throughout the course of the drama. Pessl would like "Night Film" to work as a meditation on the question of whether one must be a monster to effectively portray the monstrous in art (quick real-world answer: no). But her conception of the monstrous is sweetly innocent. The book leaps from bondage clubs to mental hospitals to witchcraftsupply stores , as if evil were more a matter of setting than a person's actions. To be fair, the witchcraftemporium - which turns out to be like a voodoo Apple store , right down to the Genius Bar in back - is an exquisitely charming side trip. But the evil-as-scenery tactic grows wearisome in the novel's central set piece, when the heroes break into Cordova's sprawling compound in a scene that lasts almost 50 pages and feels at least twice that. In the first two-thirds of the book, Pessl captures the feel of one of Kubrick's compact, relentless chillers, but during this not-quite-climactic climax, "Night Film" begins to feel more like one of his glacially paced statements - "Eyes Wide Shut," without the redeeming value of celebrity nudity. FOR all we get about Cordova and his films (the story lines , memorable characters, favorite motifs and symbols, casts, costumes , everything except what there was to eat at the craftservice table), the story isn't really about him at all but about his daughter, Ashley , an equally larger-than-life figure, matter to his antimatter. "Did she fall or was she pushed" is maybe a less intellectual concern than what a work of art reveals about the artist, but it serves Pessl better. Ashley Cordova at least feels like a person, whereas her father feels more like the world's most sinister IMDb entry. She's busy, anyway: she records a virtuoso piano performance at 14 , lights a man on fire , escapes a mental ward and has more than a little of the devil in her. (This last is not necessarily a metaphorical statement .) I'm not sure the reader ever becomes fully invested in her either, but no matter. Piecing together the events of Ashley's last days keeps the heroes moving and in constant contact with a personality that does connect: Manhattan itself , in her best-looking summer dress. In a book of colorful settings, this is a backdrop that refuses to drop back. Pessl's renderings of Chinese grocery stores , tattoo boutiques and the dog run in Washington Square Park are bound to remind readers of the grungy thrills of a whole different director: Martin Scorsese . Cue the Rolling Stones . More crucially, the mystery of Ashley's death gives the heroes plenty of opportunities to leap into trouble, fast-talk their way out of it and gradually wake to the realization that they love one another. Pessl is at her best here, when she's least ambitious and her focus is pinned to her three amateur detectives as they negotiate the unmapped terrain of affection and trust in sweet, breezy dialogue: "I told you. I love you. And not as a friend or a boss, but real love. I've known it for 24 hours," Nora tells McGrath, who responds, "Sounds like a stomach bug that will pass." In simple, unadorned moments like these, when her heroes seem at least as interested in one another as in a dead girl or absent auteur, "Night Film" settles into the relaxed rhythms of a Ross Macdonald mystery, with a dirt and hunger and guileless laughter that are all Pessl's own. h NIGHT FILM By Marisha Pessl 602 pp. Random House. $28. Joe Hill is the author of several novels, including "NOS4A2," and a comic book series , "Locke & Key."
Guardian Review
How do you conjure an air of mystery and dread in a novel? Marisha Pessl, in this followup to her much-praised debut, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, has apparently decided that the best way to do it is for the characters to tell one another how mysterious and dreadful everything is. If they keep doing that for nearly 600 pages, the reader will surely succumb. Offstage throughout is a horror-film director, Stanislas Cordova, described variously as "legendary" or even "a myth". A cross between Stanley Kubrick and Dario Argento, the reclusive Cordova is renowned for peculiar working practices, enormous sensual appetites, and the terrifying nature of his movies, most of which are only available as bootlegs. Now his beautiful, mysterious and "intense" daughter, Ashley, has died in possibly dodgy circumstances. Enter our hero and narrator, disgraced fortysomething writer Scott McGrath, who decides to investigate. I say "hero", but Scott is plainly a bit of an idiot. On the basis of a single anonymous phone call he had once - on live TV - more or less accused Cordova of being a child-murderer, and was then surprised to find his life falling apart and the work drying up. And for a once-successful magazine journalist, he's an alarmingly bad writer. He is addicted to italics, which festoon the pages, straining to turn ordinary words into jolts of surprise and excitement. "I checked the inside pocket," he relates at one point. "It was empty. Yet, I felt something else" (spoiler: it was another pocket.) He describes a woman "staring down at me. Or was she looking through me?" (Nah, she was probably just looking at you, mate.) Sometimes the italics seem forlornly to be trying to elevate a sentence from a kind of bland incompetence to a more baroque awfulness: "That was women for you - always morphing." (Here Scott has not encountered an actual morphing woman, like the one in the film Species who turns into an alien, but just a woman who has changed her mind.) Scott's poor taste in prose is evidently catching, because other characters he meets instantly begin talking in this robotically emphatic way as well. A drugged-up ex-lover of Cordova's who seems to have stumbled into this story from a minor Tennessee Williams play generously gives Scott page upon page of flashback exposition in this style: "Throughout history, alliances with the devil often manifest themselves in virtuosic mastery of an instrument." Yes, there seems to be black magic afoot, and so the reader is encouraged to add films such as The Wicker Man and Kill List to a mental shortlist of other influences, which probably also include The Amityville Horror and Un Chien Andalou. The task of describing Cordova's own films in such a way that they justify the awestruck epithets heaped on them by the novel's characters, however, is too much for the author or at least Scott: they sound comically dull. Scott has two sidekicks. One is a young dude called Hopper; the other a perky 19-year-old woman, with whom he tastefully declines to go to bed. These three keep bumping into each other on the streets of Manhattan, as you do, before haring off to listen to more minor characters telling interminable anecdotes about Cordova or his daughter. Perhaps the book's most interesting character is a tall fake priest, once the victim of an eerie bed-burning. There's something up with his eyes, though. "Abruptly, the man jerked his head up and stared right at me," Scott reports. In case those italics hadn't sufficed to make the moment dramatic enough, he starts a new paragraph and goes on: "It was such a penetrating look it stunned me." By this point in the novel, after 400 pages and with nearly 200 still to go, I too was stunned, but not in a good way. This is not an unremittingly bad book. There is a nicely weird scene set at a secret club called Oubliette (the feel here is a bit Eyes Wide Shut), and near the end, the cinematic conceit flickers to life with a chase through a series of abandoned film-sets, which is a colourfully uncanny sequence. I counted one decent joke and one half-sentence of thoughtfully imagistic description: an imposing old building at night is "fortified with shadow, as if shadows were the very mortar that kept it standing". Anyone writing a very long postmodern horror-movie novel is working in the giant shadow cast by Mark Z Danielewski's majestic House of Leaves, any comparison with which will do Night Film no favours at all. But Pessl's book does play more games with cosmetic "documentary" evidence: handwritten notes, interview typescripts, missing-persons reports, and the like. There are also screenshots of fake online articles about Cordova and Ashley in the windows of an internet browser (recognisable as Safari), purportedly from the websites of the New York Times, Time, Vanity Fair, and other real publications. (One wonders what kind of permissions deal, if any, was done with them.) So the internet is here framed as a guarantor of reality for fiction: Pessl has also posted some short videos and other paraphernalia related to the novel online, in a hopeful stab at transmedia virality. All this bespeaks, perhaps, a literary anxiety about authenticity in the digital age, as though publisher and author were worried that mere words on a page were no longer enough. In this case, I'll cheerfully agree, they're right. To order Night Film for pounds 13.59 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Steven Poole Offstage throughout is a horror-film director, Stanislas Cordova, described variously as "legendary" or even "a myth". A cross between Stanley Kubrick and Dario Argento, the reclusive Cordova is renowned for peculiar working practices, enormous sensual appetites, and the terrifying nature of his movies, most of which are only available as bootlegs. Now his beautiful, mysterious and "intense" daughter, Ashley, has died in possibly dodgy circumstances. Enter our hero and narrator, disgraced fortysomething writer Scott McGrath, who decides to investigate. I say "hero", but Scott is plainly a bit of an idiot. On the basis of a single anonymous phone call he had once - on live TV - more or less accused Cordova of being a child-murderer, and was then surprised to find his life falling apart and the work drying up. And for a once-successful magazine journalist, he's an alarmingly bad writer. He is addicted to italics, which festoon the pages, straining to turn ordinary words into jolts of surprise and excitement. "I checked the inside pocket," he relates at one point. "It was empty. Yet, I felt something else" (spoiler: it was another pocket.) He describes a woman "staring down at me. Or was she looking through me?" (Nah, she was probably just looking at you, mate.) Sometimes the italics seem forlornly to be trying to elevate a sentence from a kind of bland incompetence to a more baroque awfulness: "That was women for you - always morphing." (Here Scott has not encountered an actual morphing woman, like the one in the film Species who turns into an alien, but just a woman who has changed her mind.) - Steven Poole.
Kirkus 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. In her sophomore effort, Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics, 2006) hits the scary ground running. Filmmaker Stanislas Cordova has made a specialty of goose bumps for years; as Pessl writes, he's churned out things that keep people from entering dark rooms alone, things about which viewers stay shtum ever after. Cordova himself hasn't granted an interview since 1977, when Rolling Stone published his description of his favorite frame as "sovereign, deadly, perfect." Cordova is thrust back into the limelight when his daughter is found dead in an abandoned warehouse in Chinatown. Scott McGrath, reporter on the way to being washed-up, finds cause for salvation of a kind in the poor young woman's demise. McGrath's history with Cordova stretches back years, and now, it's up to him to find out just how bad this extra-bad version of Hitchcock really is. He finds out, too; as one of the shadowy figures who wanders in and out of these pages remarks, ominously, "Some knowledge, it eats you alive." Oh, yes, it does. Readers will learn a thing or two about psychotropic drugs, to say nothing of the dark side of Manhattan and the still darker side of filmmaking. And speaking of hallucinations, Pessl's book does a good imitation of a multimedia extravaganza, interspersed with faux web pages and images. All it needs is for a voice to croak out "boo" from the binding, and it'd be complete unto itself. A touch too coyly postmodern at times, but a worthwhile entertainment all the same.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Sometimes the audiobook format elevates a book; in this case, much is lost in translation (although this isn't owing to Jake Weber's narration, which suits the noir atmosphere of the story). The basic plot of Pessl's (Special Topics in Calamity Physics) long-awaited novel follows reporter Scott McGrath's investigation into the apparent suicide of an enigmatic horror film director's equally enigmatic (and beautiful and gifted) daughter. So much of the narrative is interwoven with supplemental material-social media posts, photographs and film stills from the director's movies, reproductions of magazine articles, etc.-that a straight listen forfeits the innovative feeling of the text itself. A PDF is included with the audiobook, as well as instructions for how to load this material onto a smartphone or tablet, but there is really no easy way to follow along while listening, especially if one enjoys audiobooks while multitasking. VERDICT Recommended (with reservations) where the book is popular. ["This creepy and exciting mystery story.... is a kind of detective procedural and slows down a bit over its considerable length, but the addition of photos, quotations, and background materials in differing formats adds a realistic element to a thrilling read," read the review of the Random hc, LJ 6/15/13.]-Victoria A. -Caplinger, NoveList, Durham, NC (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
PROLOGUE New York City 2:32 AM Everyone has a Cordova story, whether they like it or not. Maybe your next-door neighbor found one of his movies in an old box in her attic and never entered a dark room alone again. Or, your boyfriend bragged he'd discovered a contraband copy of At Night All Birds Are Black on the Internet and after watching, refused to speak of it, as if it were a horrific ordeal he'd barely survived. Whatever your opinion of Cordova, however obsessed with his work or indifferent---he's there to react against. He's a crevice, a black hole, an unspecified danger, a relentless outbreak of the unknown in our overexposed world. He's underground, looming unseen in the corners of the dark. He's down under the railway bridge in the river with all the missing evidence, and the answers that will never see the light of day. He's a myth, a monster, and a mortal man. And yet, I can't help but believe when you need him the most, Cordova has a way of heading straight toward you, like a mysterious guest you notice across the room at a crowded party. In the blink of an eye, he's right beside you by the fruit punch, staring back at you when you turn and casually ask the time. My Cordova tale began for the second time on a rainy, mid-October night, when I was just another man running in circles, going nowhere as fast as I could. I was jogging around Central Park's Reservoir after two A.M--a risky habit I'd adopted during the past year when I was too strung out to sleep, hounded by an inertia I couldn't explain, except for the vague understanding that the best part of my life was behind me, and that sense of possibility I'd once had so innately as a young man, was now gone. It was cold and I was soaked. The gravel track was rutted with puddles, the black waters of the Reservoir cloaked in mist. It clogged the reeds along the bank and erased the outskirts of the Park as if it were nothing but paper, the edges torn away. All I could see of the grand buildings along Fifth Avenue were a few gold lights burning through the gloom, reflecting on the water's edge like dull coins tossed in. Every time I sprinted past one of the iron lampposts, my shadow surged past me, quickly grew faint, and then peeled off--as if it didn't have the nerve to stay. I was bypassing the south gatehouse, starting my sixth lap, when I glanced over my shoulder and saw someone was behind me. A woman was standing in front of a lamppost, her face in shadow, her red coat catching the light behind her, making a vivid red slice in the night. A young woman out here alone ? Was she crazy? I turned back, faintly irritated by the girl's naiveté--or recklessness , whatever it was that brought her out here. Women of Manhattan, magnificent as they were, they forgot sometimes they weren't immortal. They could throw themselves like confetti into a fun-filled Friday night, with no thought as to what crack they fell into by Saturday. The track straightened north, rain needling my face, the branches hanging low, forming a crude tunnel overhead. I veered past rows of benches and the curved bridge, mud splattering my shins. The woman---whoever she was---appeared to have disappeared. But then--far ahead, a flicker of red . It vanished as soon as I saw it, then seconds later, I could make out a thin dark silhouette walking slowly in front of me along the iron railing. She was wearing black boots, her dark hair hanging halfway down her back. I picked up my pace, deciding to pass her exactly when she was beside a lamppost so I could take a closer look and make sure she was all right. As I neared, however, I had the marked feeling she wasn't . It was the sound of her footsteps, too heavy for such a slight person, the way she walked so stiffly, as if waiting for me. I suddenly had the feeling that as I passed she'd turn and I'd see her face was not young as I'd assumed, but old . The ravaged face of an old woman would stare back at me with hollowed eyes, a mouth like an axe gash in a tree. She was just a few feet ahead now. She was going to reach out, seize my arm, and her grip would be strong as a man's, ice cold --- I ran past, but her head was lowered, hidden by her hair. When I turned again, she'd already stepped beyond the light and was little more than a faceless form cut out of the dark, her shoulders outlined in red. I took off, taking a shortcut as the path twisted through the dense shrubbery, branches whipping my arms. I'll stop and say something when I pass her again---tell her to go home . But I logged another lap and there was no sign of her. I checked the hill leading down to the bridle paths. Nothing . Within minutes, I was approaching the north gatehouse---a stone building beyond the reach of the lamps, soaked in darkness. I couldn't make out much more than a flight of narrow stairs leading up to a rusted set of double doors, which were chained and locked, a sign posted beside them: KEEP OUT PROPERTY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK. As I neared, I realized in alarm, glancing up, that she was there, standing on the landing, staring down at me. Or was she looking through me ? By the time her presence fully registered I'd already run blindly on. Yet, what I'd glimpsed in that split-second drifted in front of my eyes as if someone had taken a flash picture: tangled hair, that blood red coat decayed brown in the dark, a face so entirely in shadow it seemed possible it wasn't even there. Clearly I should've held off on that fourth scotch. There was a time not too long ago when it took a little more to rattle me. Scott McGrath, a journalist who'd go to hell just to get Lucifer on the record, some blogger had once written. I'd taken it as a compliment. Prison inmates who'd tattooed their faces with shoe polish and their own piss, armed teenagers from Vigário Geral strung out on pedra , Medellin heavies who vacationed yearly at Ricker's--none of it made me flinch. It was all just part of the scenery. Now, a woman in the dark was unnerving me. She had to be drunk. Or she'd popped too many Xanax. Or maybe this was some sick teenage dare--an Upper East Side mean girl had put her up to this. Unless it was all a calculated setup and her street-rat boyfriend was somewhere here, waiting to jump me. If that were the idea they'd be disappointed. I had no valuables on me except my keys, a switchblade, and my MetroCard, worth about eight bucks. Alright, maybe I was going through a rough patch, dry spell --whatever the hell you wanted to call it. Maybe I hadn't defended myself since--well, technically the late nineties. But you never forgot how to fight for your life. And it was never too late to remember, unless you were dead. The night felt unnaturally silent, still . That mist--it had moved beyond the water into the trees, overtaken the track like a sickness, an exhaust off something in the air here, something malignant. Another minute and I was approaching the north gatehouse. I shot past it, expecting to see her on the landing. It was deserted. There was no sign of her anywhere. Yet, the longer I ran, the path unspooling like an underpass to some dark new dimension in front of me, the more I found the encounter unfinished, a song that had cut out on an expectant note, a film projector sputtering to a halt seconds before a pivotal chase scene, the screen going white. I couldn't shake the powerful feeling that she was very much here , hiding somewhere, watching me. I swore I caught a whiff of perfume embroidered into the damp smells of mud and rain. I squinted into the shadows along the hill, expecting, at any moment, the bright red cut of her coat. Maybe she'd be sitting on a bench or standing on the bridge. Had she come here to harm herself ? What if she climbed up onto the railing, waiting, staring at me with a face drained of hope before stepping off, falling to the road far below like a bag of stones? Maybe I'd had a fifth scotch without realizing. Or this damned city had finally gotten to me . I took off down the steps, heading down East Drive and out onto Fifth Avenue, rounding the corner onto East Eighty-sixth Street, the rain turning into a downpour. I jogged three blocks, past the shuttered restaurants, bright lobbies with a couple of bored doormen staring out. At the Lexington entrance to the subway, I heard the rumble of an approaching train. So I sprinted down the next flight, swiping my MetroCard through the turnstiles. A few people were waiting on the platform---a couple of teenagers, an elderly woman with a Bloomingdale's bag. The train careened into the station, screeching to a halt and I stepped into an empty car. " This is a Brooklyn-bound four train. The next stop is Fifty-ninth Street ." Shaking off the rain, I stared out at the deserted benches, an ad for a sci-fi action movie covered in graffiti. Someone had blinded the sprinting man on the poster, scribbling out his eyes with black marker. The doors pounded closed. With a moan of brakes, the train began to pull away. And then, suddenly, I was aware, coming slowly down the steps in the far corner---shiny black boots and red , a red coat. I realized, as she stepped lower and lower , soaked black hair like ink seeping over her shoulders, that it was she, the girl from the Reservoir, the ghost-- whatever the hell she was . But before I could comprehend this impossibility, before my mind could shout, She was coming for me , the train whipped into the tunnel, the windows went black, and I was left staring only at myself. Excerpted from Night Film by Marisha Pessl All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
