"The horror, the horror..."

 "The recently published horror novel Night Film by Marisha Pessl has this to say about being scared: 'Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are.'
     This is exactly why I write horror. Fear is crucial to my life. It always has been. My list of fears is long and legendary: leeches, ghosts, the Apocalypse, Skeksis, aliens, the coyotes I see skulking down my street at night, swimming in the ocean, a killer hiding in my backseat, basements, cougars, clowns, zombies, abandoned houses, swimming in a quarry, rat hordes, heights, getting lost in a cave like Tom Sawyer, being buried alive, rustling cornfields, pets that come back to life, buckets of pig's blood, reading "The Shining" with a flashlight at three in the morning in the dark in a dead silent house...
     My fear has helped me learn what I'm made of. It has shown me what I am. My list of scary books is not comprehensive, and leaves off some greats like The Road, Perfume, House of Leaves, and several Stephen King titles. But most of the books I mention I first read as an adolescent, and they still haunt me today. Which means something."
— April Genevieve Tucholke, Huffington Post

Find out what's on that list here…

Se a post about Marisha Pessl's latest book Night Film here...

stunt doubles and stand-ins

"Marisha Pessl’s new literary thriller – arriving seven years after her splashy debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics – captures something true about the viral, jumpy, surface-skittering way we live now. In an age of the infinitely reproducible, Pessl strives for innovation through remix rather than originality. Clichés and too-familiar tropes are prized playthings for her, and the more the merrier. Nothing is new in Night Film except for the abandon with which the author piles on references to movies and magazines and websites and other books; yet by mimicking the frantic hypertexture of contemporary life, the novel keeps reminding us just how much has changed. […]

     A brash stylistic maneuver energizes the novel’s opening pages, in which Pessl presents facts about Ashley’s life and death through a series of website simulations, newspaper and magazine clippings, and other realistic-looking documents. In a faux NewYorkTimes.com article, Ashley (or, more accurately, an uncredited stand-in for her) stares challengingly in an accompanying photo, looking a bit like a sulkier young Amanda Peet, while a Time.com slideshow clicks through the particulars of Stanislas Cordova’s life, including his three ex-wives and the 300-acre Adirondacks estate that has been his home since 1976 and has served as the location for most of his films. "
— Donna Rifkind, The Christian Science Monitor
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