- By Nitsuh Abebe - Vulture 65 August, 2013
Four years ago, Marisha Pessl—author of the celebrated 2006 novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics—visited Lenoir-Rhyne University, in her native North Carolina, and gave a lecture, during which she did something really, really strange that nobody seemed to notice. You can watch a video of it online. Pessl, then 31 years old and world-beatingly poised and professional, stands at a lectern, in a tan jacket and high ruffled collar, and gives a brief talk on a classic topic—the where-do-you-get-your-ideas question that always greets writers of fiction. The strange bit comes at the end, before the obligatory Q&A, as she wraps up with the obligatory quote. “When asked in a 1986 Life interview to explain his films’ wide popularity,” she deadpans, “the American film director Stanislas Cordova replied, ‘I don’t know. I just let the audience quietly spy on themselves.’ ”
Cinema buffs may notice a problem here, which is that there is no such widely popular American director named Stanislas Cordova. He is a character from Night Film, Pessl’s second novel, a giddily creepy thriller out this month from Random House. Cordova’s the enigma who casts a shadow on every page: a reclusive maker of cult horror films and harrowing psychological thrillers whose fifteen-picture filmography Pessl has imagined in enough detail—not just premises but plots, set pieces, twist endings, costuming, even the gimmicky packaging of the DVD set—that you close the book half-suspecting there’s some obscure torrent site where they’re all available for download. “Before I even set out to write,” she says, “I knew the plots of all those movies. And my mom was like, ‘I think they actually need you to write the book, not come up with the filmography. Can you please write the novel everyone wants you to write?’ ” Pessl’s already sold the motion-picture rights to Night Film, but only with the provision that she can keep mining the spare plots tucked inside.
Any reader of Pessl’s novels will notice she’s a lover of puzzles and secrets, hidden connections and buried clues. Slipping a fictional character into a workaday lecture, though—whether as an in-joke with herself or an Easter egg for readers of a book she hadn’t even written yet—might qualify as what they call next level. I get the feeling it says something specific about a writer, that she’d do that, but when I ask Pessl about it, she just laughs and says, “I know! It’s so funny.
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