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Pessl's first novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, had an unusual effect on me. I didn't The Passage- orPresumed Innocent-love it, and it didn't make me a wreck for five days like The Road; what I would say it did was it delighted me. It was slow going and awfully pretentious for a while, but by the time it was over I thought I'd been jolted by low-level current and things were still kind of buzzy and I didn't have full feeling in my extremities. Ok, not that last part. The point is, I really liked it, and I'd been excited about her next book for a long time.

... And it, Night Film, I mean, was ok. It was pretty good. It was [other noncommittal adjective]. The first two thirds read like a very well-written mystery/thriller, including even one goose-bumpy moment that made me hope the payoff was going to be a lot cooler than it was. After about 90 (short) chapters, it tried to become Literary Fiction, capital L, capital F, and characters went through Trials and Made Choices and were Transformed and there was Symbolism and Thought-Provoking Ambiguity and it was all kind of twee. Not every question was answered, and I suppose that's the way life is, but there were a couple you might have liked to see tied up in little bows. I don't think it was just me, I think you're deliberately led to expect a more remarkable conclusion than you get.

It is well-written, even the dialogue is well-written, which is a compliment, but is also a backhanded one. Pretty much every character in the book sounds like Marisha Pessl when they talk. Marisha Pessl has a wonderful vocabulary and rhythm and writes evocatively, but the reason you notice that is that not everybody is like that, least of all fictional characters, whose personalities and presences you would prefer be varied and interesting. Dialogue-wise, I missed Elmore Leonard at times for reasons beyond his having recently died.

This is all coming out sounding more negative than the book deserves, though, because it is an absorbing story, you genuinely care about the characters you're supposed to be caring about, and you never quite know what's going to happen next, and you're in a hurry to find out. Not bad! Just not fantastic. In-between.

The narrative structure is going to make you grumpy. We have two POV characters, a freelance assassin whose narrative is always first person, and an in-over-his-head cop whose narratives are either first or third person. It takes a little while, but I suppose you get used to that.

We have in the book a world where a malformed protein is invading people (you find out how near the end) and causing them not to be able to sleep. After a while, this leads to what the doctors call losing your shit, and eventually death. Basic society is breaking down, hard, as we begin the story. There’s no cure that anybody is aware of, but there is a drug that can bring much-needed relief to victims. (You’re right: it lets them sleep. Ish.) Many people have sequestered themselves inside a MMORPG, the chits and currencies and treasures of which are valuable enough to enough people that “real world” crime has a piece of the action.

You know superficially how the two viewpoint characters are linked fairly early on, but the whole truth comes later, and is underwhelming. There’s no real villain of the piece. There’s no obvious solution anybody is striving towards. The cop has a wife who’s sleepless and a baby who might be, but, speaking for myself, I really didn’t care. Any more, I might add, than the viewpoint character himself did — over and over and over he has to tell himself that it’s really important that he make the world a safe place for his baby. He has to do this because he doesn’t actually feel it.

The assassin’s nonchalance-o-meter is dialed up to 9 the whole book, making it awfully difficult to give a shit about him, either. The story ends, as stories will, with some characters doomed for their flaws because they couldn’t change, and others who change and are therefore rewarded. Neither one, though, seems even a little realistic. It certainly isn’t satisfying.

I don’t recommend the book.