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mattdube 's review for:
Night Film
by Marisha Pessl
I kind of feel a big 'eh' about this book, which didn't frighten me or particularly captivate me, even though I read it to the end. It felt, and this is going to sound snobby, like a dumbed down version of _House of Leaves_, which similarly integrated different kinds of materials and sort of explored film making and its relationship to the occult. I never finished _House of Leaves_ and I did finish this book, but I felt a lot less challenged and interested by this one-- with House I felt like I wasn't willing to do the work the book needed from me, whereas with this, I felt like I did no work at all. And the writing, I thought, wasn't very good on a sentence level-- why does every journalist character have to be a hack in a very particular purple way? And how can so many writers get away with using that as an excuse for overwriting? The supposedly scary bits weren't all that scary to me-- and I like being scared by a good book. I grew up reading Amityville and others and terrifying myself, but this felt like a seventies rubber suit Frankenstein movie.
I did, for no really clear reason, like the two supporting characters, the boy and girl the main guy knocks around with-- the girl, especially, seemed to have a story to tell that this book never quite got across, and I liked the boy, thinking about what he was up to, what did he know that he wasn't telling. They probably kept me reading till the end.
I did, for no really clear reason, like the two supporting characters, the boy and girl the main guy knocks around with-- the girl, especially, seemed to have a story to tell that this book never quite got across, and I liked the boy, thinking about what he was up to, what did he know that he wasn't telling. They probably kept me reading till the end.