“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.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JAN 11, 2014)

This psychological, genre-bursting/ busting literary thriller took me on a high-speed chase into a Byzantine rabbit hole into the quirkiest, eeriest, darkest parts of the soul. Investigative reporter Scott McGrath is on a quest to exhume the facts of a young piano prodigy’s tragic end. Ashley Cordova, 24, daughter of cult-horror film director, Stanislav Cordova, was found dead–allegedly a suicide. The now reclusive director (30 years isolated from known whereabouts) is the reason for McGrath’s ruined reputation five years ago, and Scott is hungry to turn things around, upside down, and inside out to pursue Cordova again and save himself. And to disinter the “truth,” which itself can be an illusory concept in this cat and mouse thriller.

Along the way, McGrath assembles a motley group of two with their own agendas for chasing after the true story of Ashley’s death. It’s almost unbelievable that Scott would let these potential loose cannons join up with him, a virtual loner, but Pessl gives it cred by keeping the reader in an ever-tunneling and tumbling maze of intellectual, emotional, and horror-filled murk. Whatever mental notes you take as the narrative builds, the ever-widening cast and real, random, red herring, or suspect clues keep you from perseverating too long on the questionable partnerships. Each untangled knot corkscrews around to create ropier more entangled ones.

Mind games and magic, or mind games vs magic, is explored in a way that transports you to the most subterranean reaches of the human psyche. Pessl’s penetrating use of symbolism, allegory, literary allusion, and metaphor saturates the story with a weighty unease and anxiety that reflect her incomparable understanding of the human condition–(not to mention a rarefied channeling of hallucinogenic experiences). In Night Film, mind over matter is a daring question with a dangerous reckoning.

Pessl is obviously familiar with Hitchcock’s work, as well as the films of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrik. Additionally, the iconic 40’s noir films infuse Night Film with oblique shadows and moral ambiguity and imbue it with mixed media from the Internet age. Throw in a little Stephen King to the mix, too. However, Pessl’s use of pastiche is brushed and buffed into her own variegated style, with a voice that is strikingly poetic. She winks at and pays homage more than she mimics.

The gritty and shadowy streets, railway tracks, bridges, and warehouses of New York; the dark silhouette of the Adirondacks against a night sky; mansions sitting like a pit bull on a bluff; the mist obscuring the hand or a face or the gnarled limb of a tree–all Pessl’s ethereal images suffuse the story with an almost sepulchral ambiance. There were times I jumped while reading, certain I heard a cup rattling on a shelf, or saw a light flickering behind a curtain. At other times, my heart melted, especially when Scott would successfully enlist his five-year-old daughter to help his investigation. She was uncannily guileless but aware and persuasive.

The overriding theme can be found in the first lines of the book, a quote from Stanislav Cordova that begins the prologue:

“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. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out?”

What happens when we break through our cocoon and walk to the edge and back? Are we blinding ourselves to our true nature, and to the nature of others, when we attempt to hold desperately onto those we love?

“Life was a freight train barreling toward just one stop, our loved ones streaking past our windows in blurs of color and light. There was no holding on to any of it, and no slowing down.”

This is at turns comical, disturbing, terrifying, tragic, tender, and spiritually poetic. The pace is breakneck and pitch-perfect electric, despite its florid and exuberant sentences, and the prose is evocative, aphoristic, savvy. It’s relentless and addictive, no time to catch your breath before you are falling through another black hole.

If you prefer a straight-up horror or crime-solving genre, this may not please you. Pessl breaks the rules and the mold, and the narrative is as much philosophy and metaphysics as it is mystery and mysticism. I was chasing shadows and rainbows in equal measure.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 562 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (August 20, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Marisha Pessl
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Bibliography:

• Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006)
• Night Film (August 2013)

“The circus arrives without warning.

No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers.  It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (SEP 13, 2011)

Illusion and reality intersect and overlap to reveal a luminous, mesmerizing character– Le Cirque des Rêves (The Circus of Dreams). As the sun is the center of the solar system, the Circus of Dreams is the central character of this enchanting tale. Like a magnetic field, Le Cirque des Rêves pulls in other characters like orbiting satellites around a bright star. This isn’t your childhood circus–rather, this is more in tune with Lewis Carroll or M.C. Escher–a surreal and hypnotic place of the imagination and spirit.

Le Cirque des Rêves is a dazzling venue of magical intensity and Tarot images, a story of dreams and desires. It is an invention that reflects the Jungian collective unconscious and personifies the archetypes of polarity–night/day, good/evil, life/death, safety/danger, among other symbols and experiences that have repeated themselves since ancient times. The manipulations of these images and forces speak to the core of the story.

At the end of the nineteenth century in London, two self-regarding necromancers arrange a duel, part of an ongoing contest reaching back through their long history. Prospero the Magician and “the man in the grey suit” agree to provide a worthy opponent each for this contest of illusion, a competition that is only partly visible to the reader’s eye. Prospero trains his daughter, Celia; the grey-suited man selects a fitting boy, Marco, from an orphanage. Sealed with a ring in a familiar ritual, the turf war proceeds.

When Marco and Celia become adults, the duel commences within the venue of the atmospheric, aromatic circus, which is open only at night, in colors black and white (and shades of silver). The duel and its setting is showcased in its artistry of conception, the beauty of its containment, and the mystery of its migration. Le Cirque des Rêves travels silently, invisibly, from country to country, unannounced. There’s a tent of stars, a room of sculpted ice, a pool of tears. The fireplace burns eternally with a white-hot blaze. The landscape of the duel’s setting is a phantasmagorical tour de force.

The cast is inseparable from Le Cirque des Rêves. Among others, they include the tattooed contortionist, Tsukiko, the twins, Poppet and Widget, (born on the dawn of the circus’ opening night), and the Tarot reader, Isobel. Marco is a chameleon-like magician and Celia is the Isis of alchemy. They mirror the archetypes of Jung’s collective unconscious–the shadow; the animus/anima; the hero; the mother; sacrifice/rebirth; the Self, and the wise old man.

The tarot readings, like the story’s progression, are dynamic components of character transformation, digging down to the layers of repressed memories and sublime intuition. ??Within this process of transformation, the individual characters of this story must journey through uncharted terrain like portals in the soul, proceeding toward a cosmic relationship with humanity. How to separate reality from illusion and arrive at the totality of the Self? What obstacles and pathologies must be overcome to achieve a kindred consciousness? Likewise, the duelists become lovers, complicating the stakes of the game–if you win, you lose.

A magnificent, spectral clock is commissioned from a renowned German clockmaker, a clock that is mystical and harlequin, dreamlike and figurative. It stands like an emissary at the gates of the circus, a timepiece of magical stratification, an emblem of temporal shifts. No patrons can enter until dusk, and all must be gone by dawn.

In Erin Morganstern’s enchanting first novel, illusion and reality are two sides of the same coin. Inspiration and imagination become tangible territory, a dream circus of the wakened mind, a magical mystery tour of the unconscious. This is a Fool’s (Hero’s) journey, an adventure for the immortal child and enduring lovers, to a star-filled tunnel and a silver sky. Step from bare grass to painted ground, eye the towering tents of black and white stripes. Enter.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1085 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (September 13, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Erin Morganstern
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers

Bibliography:

• The Night Circus (September 2011)

“I know that changes are coming, and we must be ready to face them. Dark and terrible things, things such as what you saw with Lord Byron and at the mill, but those things are … minor disturbances, harbingers of beings much more dangerous.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  AUG 26, 2011)

The Twelfth Enchantment, by David Liss, starts off promisingly. It is the early nineteenth century and our heroine, Lucy Derrick, is a twenty-year-old orphan who is living unhappily in Nottingham, England, with her cruel uncle and an abusive woman named Mrs. Quince. Although she was well-educated by her late father, Lucy was left almost penniless when he died. She is at the mercy of her vicious uncle, Richard Lowell, who cannot wait to be rid of her. In fact, her uncle plans to give her hand in marriage to a thirty-five year old, dried up prune of a man named Olson, the owner of a local hosiery mill.

Although the Industrial Revolution has brought prosperity to some, this newfound wealth and efficiency has come at a high price. Smokestacks belch thick and toxic fumes that pollute the areas bordering the factories. In addition, manual laborers have been replaced by machinery, leading to high unemployment and abject poverty for those who can no longer feed their families. Furthermore, conditions in the factories are vile and unsafe; even the children who work the looms are beaten when they do not meet their overseer’s expectations.

Lucy’s existence is upended by a series of strange events involving Lord Byron (he shows up often in historical fiction these days), a roué named Mr. Morrison who tarnished Lucy’s reputation when she was just sixteen, an avuncular William Blake, and a mysterious and beautiful stranger, Mary Crawford, who introduces Lucy to a world of spells. It seems that Lucy has uncanny abilities that, if harnessed properly, would give her enormous power. She will need to master a huge amount of arcane knowledge and show tremendous courage, for she will find herself pitted against mighty and evil forces.

Meanwhile, Lucy must decide whether to fend off Byron’s not entirely unwelcome attentions (she admits that he is gorgeous to look at but a thorough reprobate). Lucy has a great deal on her plate: Whom can she really trust? Does she have the intellect and determination to use her unique talent effectively? Will she ever meet the love of her life?

By now, you may have deduced that Liss has overstuffed his narrative. There is a derivative quality to this novel that brings to mind familiar (and better) works, such as: Jane Eyre, who was cast off without a penny but stood up for herself as a proud, moral, and independent woman; Hard Times, in which Charles Dickens decries the forced labor of children and excoriates those who would enrich themselves on the backs of the poor; and the Harry Potter series, in which J. K. Rowling breathes life into magic and wizardry, while also dealing with feelings, relationships, and social issues. Liss often writes lush sentences, is a skilled descriptive writer, and he imbues Lucy with warmth and spirit. It is really too bad that, as the book progresses, the author resorts to clichés, contrivances, and silly twists and turns. The conclusion is flat and anticlimactic, when it should have been exciting and exhilarating. Much of The Twelfth Enchantment is captivating, but the weak conclusion may leave readers less than spellbound.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 47 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House; First Edition edition (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Liss
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Devil’s Company A Spectacle of Corruption The Coffee Trader See also: Jane and the Madness of Lord Bryron by Stephanie Barron

Bibliography:

Benjamin Weaver thrillers:

• A Conspiracy of Paper (2000) /
• A Spectacle of Corruption (2004)
• The Devil’s Company (2009)

Other Historical novels:

• The Coffee Trader (2003)
• The Ethical Assassin (2006)
• The Whiskey Rebels (2008)
• The Twelfth Enchantment (August 2011)

“They did not know that Vaclav and Lena would wander past the famous Coney Island Sideshow and see magic tricks and Heather Holliday and her golden fringed bikini for the first time. They could not know that this would be the beginning of everything.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUL 4, 2011)

Once upon a time, in the exotic land of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, a young boy named Vaclav – an aspiring magician – falls in love with a thin, skittish girl named Lena.  And, like any alchemy, the combustion is magical…and it endures.

There is a refreshing fairy tale quality about Vaclav & Lena, a lovely debut book by Haley Tanner.  Slowly but surely, I fell under the spellbinding tale of this would-be magician and his girl.  It’s an endearing tale that unfolds with gentle fireworks rather than major pyrotechnics – rather like the magic seen in the starlit sky on a summer’s night in Coney Island.

Vaclav is a young boy hero:  extremely bright, precocious, very loyal and good, and filled with innocent dreams of becoming a famous magician. Central to this goal is the assistance of Lena, a troubled and introverted girl who is imprisoned by her lack of an English vocabulary.  In the midst of their grand plans, Vaclav’s caring mother, Rasia, unearths a tragic secret about Lena’s home life with her negligent, drug-addicted aunt.  And overnight – for Vaclav – Lena vanishes into thin air, like a cruel magic trick.

Fast-forward seven years.  Vaclav is now a tall, handsome teenager, attending Brooklyn Tech, thoroughly assimilated into American culture, with a svelte American girlfriend.  It’s all come together with him with one exception:  he misses his childhood love.  Eventually, the reader is reacquainted with Lena and we learn what has happened to her in the interceding years and who she has become in the interim.

In a less capable writer’s hands, this book would simply be a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-regains-girl formula book, with the Russian émigré theme as a major overlay.  But Haley Tanner is more than “merely capable.” She writes a love story and like all real love stories, there’s a touch of magic that’s part-and-parcel with the theme. In one interview, she says, “Magicians are like story-tellers in that we know that the quarter does not disappear, that the woman is not sliced in half, but we suspend our disbelief for a time and allow ourselves to be carried away.  It is the same thing we do when we read a novel about a character we know to be fictional, but we cry and laugh and love along with them anyway.”

We believe in that magic.  There is inevitability in this book, a strong belief that love will eventually find its way and what’s meant to be will be.  “How did it happen,” Vaclav ponders, “that Lena went overnight from a yearning to an addiction? She seems to have planted herself into this life and sprouted, almost instantly, without his knowing, from a tiny seed into an entire jungle.” We become enchanted with the idea that Vaclav possesses the determination – and Lena possesses the will – to trick ordinary fate and prevail.  As a result, we are able to strip away the minor flaws in the plot and pacing (such as repetition) and surrender to the overall ambiance.

Vaclav & Lena crosses over to the YA category in the best way; as instruction on the distorted thinking of young and unaware children and the awkward diction and resulting problems of non-English-speaking immigrants. It has much to say about trauma and healing, the role of repressed memories, the assimilation of Russian immigrants, and the real magic we can perform through healing lies and unconditional love.  And, as a one-time Brooklynite, I felt the sense of place was excellently depicted.   Simply magical.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	The Dial Press (May 17, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Haley Tanner
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Seas by Samantha Hunt Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas

Bibliography:

• Vaclav & Lena (May 2011)

Blackbeard nodded. “I was sure you’d figured that out. Yes, old Hurwood plans to raise his wife’s ghost from her dried head and plant it in the body of his daughter. Hard luck on the daughter, left with no body…”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (JUN 12, 2011)

My review is of a paperback reprint of a Tim Powers novel, On Stranger Tides, first published to a good deal of critical acclaim in 1987. No doubt the success of the new movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides inspired the reprint.

Voodoo plays a major role in this novel, in particular with regard to resurrection. Voodoo and other western systems of magic are all tied up with the relationship between magic, blood (and its analog, sea water) and cold iron. It turns out according to this tale at least that cold iron quenches magic. The magic of Europe has been much diminished in the 17th century due to steel, armor, swords and the other trappings of European material culture. Magic flourishes in the western hemisphere where blood still rules over steel. Blood is the antithesis of cold steel; it is likened to hot iron. Magicians typically have white gums because so much of their blood is in use for magic that they suffer congenital anemia.

Oh, and there are pirates galore; most notably Blackbeard, who we discover is a powerful magician in his own right. Blackbeard’s historic practice of going into battle with lit candles woven into his beard is explained by the revelation in this tale that his patron voodoo demon, his loa, is summoned by smoldering fire. Later in the story a lit cigar serves the same purpose.

Some truly freakish and slimy souls inhabit Powers’ Caribbean world of 17th century. The good people in our tale are not all that good or pure, but they at least try. The bad ones like Blackbeard and Hurwood are truly awful. Hurwood is clearly psychotic, driven to madness by the death of his wife. In his madness he carries her rotting head in a basket and has plotted to resurrect her soul into the body of his daughter, leaving the daughter without a body to call her own. Blackbeard captains a ship of zombies. Among Blackbeard’s other atrocities is manipulating someone to bludgeon-murder his wife in order to be blackmailed into becoming a vassal pirate.

In some ways it is odd to speak to anachronism or logical irregularity in a work about invented magic, but there is one thing that stands out as being off. Hurwood is a University Don, a scholar, who knows the work of Newton and the most up to date developments in science. His explanation of the magic environment surrounding the Fountain of Youth is profoundly anachronistic. He corresponds the locale to a quantum system with some features so precisely known that other aspects are required to be correspondingly unknowable. It should be noted that Newton, who many believe was the archetypical scientist, in reality spent a great deal of his professional life involved with alchemy, and can well be thought of as a magician in his own right. No one from that time and place could have entered into the mind-set of quantum uncertainty. Another quibble is that Jack Shandy, the protagonist is less interesting than the bad guys. Additionally, his love interest, Beth, Hurwood’s daughter, is almost a non-entity. It is not that Jack is two-dimensional or just a purely good guy; he has killed, betrayed and he clearly loves. His back-story is interesting. It is just that he comes off as somewhat vapid by comparison.

Powers is an extremely gifted storyteller His wit is unfailingly dry and brilliant. His powers of bizarre invention are pretty amazing. The plot flows, jumps and bubbles weaving one fantastic invention after another. I enjoyed On Stranger Tides a great deal and I am eager for the next gem from this wizard of off beat fantasy. Readers should be encouraged to explore the long list of his fantastic novels.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 57 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper Paperbacks; Reprint edition (April 26, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Tim Powers
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton

Bibliography:

• The Skies Discrowned (1976)
• An Epitaph in Rust (1976)
• The Drawing of the Dark (1979)
• The Anubis Gate (1983) 
• Dinner at Deviant’s Palace (1985)
• On Stranger Tides (1987; April 2011)
• The Stress of Her Regard (1989)
• Night Moves and Other Stories (2000)
• Declare (2001)
• Three Days to Never (2006)

Fault Lines:

• Last Call (1992)
• Expiration (1995)
• Earthquake Weather (1997)

Movies from Books

• Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides (May 2011)