Alan Moore is one of the three writers I feel have affected me and my writing the most, at least as an adult – the others being Nick Cave and David Milch. For all three, this is partly through their work, and partly through how they think and speak about their work. Each of these creators has a deliberateness about their work that comes through in interviews and talks, and I’m indebted to all of them for the way I think about my writing.

With Moore, Watchmen, From Hell and Providence are the comics I reread the most, but they’re a small fraction of all of his books that I love. If those three didn’t exist, then Miracleman, Top Ten, Tom Strong, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Halo Jones and Promethea would be enough for a writer to qualify as a favourite. And that’s not even counting Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem, the latter of which is, for my money, one of the best novels of the 21st century thus far.

So you might say I have been waiting quite a long time for Illuminations to be published. Moore’s first prose short story collection – this is an event for me.

Rather than simply barreling through it, I thought I’d read one story at a time (in one day or longer, since some of these go on a bit – there’s a whole mid-length novel stuffed into this), and note down my thoughts as I get done with each one, starting with the first story on the day of release.

(more…)

(Mild spoilers. But nothing that reveals the plot of the book, I think.)

I have a bit of a yen for horror stories centred around films and film-making. I’m not sure what it is, but there is a certain luminosity to film, a magic that I feel is conducive to obsessive behaviour. You can see that in discussions about film – the whole ongoing argument about “auteur theory”¹, the way film stars became the most prominent kind of celebrities in a mere century, the aura that obsessive film-makers have, the way film has a hold on the dreams of the populace.

So I find myself very interested in horror stories that deal with the dangerous magic of film. And, it appears, so do horror writers. Laird Barron’s made a good meal out of integrating Eadward Muybridge² into his mythos, Gemma Files’s Experimental Film manages to blend real-life film criticism with the uncanniness of early film, before, sadly, falling apart in the second half. I’ve read several short stories over the years dealing with the topic, many of them in Mammoth horror books or Best Horror of the Year books. I remember a Frankenstein-related anthology that had a bunch of these, for obvious connections with silent film. They also lend themselves well to cosmic horror, the genre that deals with the horrific rationality of an uncaring universe.

I’ve never found myself entirely satisfied with most of these, though, even the better ones. I think there’s a slipperiness to the mystique of film. The distance it has from reality, while retaining an alluring theoretical closeness – it’s that juxtaposition that gives the idea power. Deciding on one or the other – the natural or the supernatural – is almost to miss the point.

Night Film by Marisha Pessl has, so far, come the closest to entirely satisfying me as a horror book about film. There are a few things I feel she gets just right that contribute to this.

First of all, it’s a big book – around 650 pages – which allows it to encompass many different experiences on the topic. Second, it’s narrated by a character who has desperately tried to get close to the magic and failed. This is by far the most relatable experience of the world of film, given how disproportionately big the audience of film is as compared to the creative side. Finally, it integrates “found documents” from within the world of the book, including photos, text messages, news clippings, and even screenshots of websites. There has been effort spent to make the world of this story feel real, to the point that there is apparently an augmented reality app that has even more Easter eggs and rabbitholes you can explore.³

It also helps that the book is incredibly propulsive – I started on the first page, and before I knew it, I was thirty pages in and had forgotten that I’d intended to skim the first chapter and see if this was something I wanted to read. There is immediate intrigue, and the protagonist’s motivation is something that at least makes you curious from the get-go. And there’s a sleight-of-hand trick in the writing – while you’re reading about a film-maker from the beginning, and you’re given sidelong glimpses to his movies, the book takes hundreds of pages to actually start telling you the plots of his films, and by this point, you’ve been primed to fill in all the horrifying details that the plots aren’t actually giving you. It’s a smart move, because if Pessl had started narrating these films from the beginning, you would compare the films under discussion to real-life movies. Instead, you are able to take these on their own, as creations of the fictional person you’ve already begun to believe in.

The result of this was a book that, in a rare occurrence, genuinely swept me up in itself. I wanted to know what happened next, I wanted to know the things that had already happened. And like the best books of its kind, it actually distorted my reality while I was reading it. I felt like I was living in the world of the book, which was just to the left of our reality. By that I don’t mean that it made me think anything in the book was real, but that its world was built with such precision and care that I could sink into it and not feel like the sky was lit wrong, if you know what I mean.

That’s not to say it’s a perfect book. There is a big section towards the end that sags a little, there are times when the plot twists get a bit wearying, and the ending, quite possibly, lingers too long. But on the whole, it is a book that not only understands the magic of film, but also knows that this magic is fundamentally a human one, driven by and for people.

Before reading this, my usual recommendation for people who wanted to read film-related horror was Experimental Film, with the caveat that they should approach the second half of the book with trepidation. Now it’s Night Film, and I’m more confident in how well the book works.

---

1. From what I can tell, based on a misunderstanding about what the term meant in the first place. ↩︎
2. Recently more famous through Nope, of course. ↩︎
3. I didn’t bother – the world of the book was enough for me, for one thing, and I felt that I’d be distracted more than engaged if I started scanning QR codes in a book. Your mileage may vary. ↩︎