'Night Film' is Kerri's book pick

Kerri's book pick this week is "Night Film" by Marisha Pessl.

She's reading it at the urging of Stephanie Curtis, who said on the show that "if you love movies, this is a great novel about the love of movies and the power of movies and how creepy movies can be if they stick with you."

Stephanie said the book is about the search for a legendary director of horror movies. Part of what makes the book so compelling, she said, is the depth and detail of the world the author has created: "You feel like she has written the entire screenplays of these movies in her head already."

Kerri pointed out that the novel has come under some criticism for its use of gimmicks, like fictional reprinted texts and other materials. Stephanie said the device "really makes the world come to life."

Reviewing the book for NPR, Meg Wolitzer writes:

In its best moments, reading this book is like sitting in a movie theater in wraparound darkness, feeling a deep chill that's part air conditioning, part anticipation. A lovely, granular black-and-white quality haunts the novel. Pessl has created Cordova's body of work down to the titles and plots and tiny details, as if in some deep part of herself, she really believes these movies, with names like "Thumbscrew" and "At Night All Birds Are Black" exist. But that's what novelists do: They believe their own details, and this book is obsessive in the things it describes and catalogs.

Stephanie also recommended a book she's been reading, "Hello Goodbye Hello," by Craig Brown. It recounts surprising one-on-one encounters between famous people, like Groucho Marx and T. S. Eliot or Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky.

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