Night Film: A Novel

Staying so nimbly out of sight, letting us view only the twisted shadows he made on the wall, Cordova still existed primarily in my mind—the most powerful place for any enemy to hide. His very films told you that. The suspected but unseen threat, fueled by the imagination, was punishing and all-powerful. It’d devastate before you even left your room, your bed, before you even opened your eyes and took a breath.

“I’m calling him Murad, after the cigarettes.”

“Never heard of them.”

“They’re an obsolete Turkish brand, popular in the 1910s and ’20s. Murad means ‘desire’ in Arabic. The only brand that ever appears in a Cordova film is Murad. There’s not one Marlboro, Camel, or Virginia Slim. It goes further. If the Murad cigarette is focused upon by the camera in any Cordova film, the very next person who appears on-screen has been devastatingly targeted.

It was a covert line of attack described in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Your enemy expected the direct approach. He prepared for it and fiercely fought it off, resulting in severe casualties, the expenditure of major resources — and, ultimately, your own defeat. And yet, occasionally, there was another entrance, the fragile corridor. Your enemy never expected advancement via this route because it was labyrinthine and treacherous, and he often didn’t even know it was there. But if your army managed to make it through, it would deliver you not just behind your enemy’s lines but to his inner chamber, the heart of his heart

It was Ravel’s Jeux d’eau.”

In other words, the gods will have drawn a great big X across his shoulder blades and taped an invisible sign there that reads FUCKED. His life will henceforth never be the same.”

“ ‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.’ ”

Wolfgang Beckman: film scholar, professor, rabid Cordovite, and author of six books on cinema, including the popular tome on horror movies American Mask

It was a covert line of attack described in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Your enemy expected the direct approach. He prepared for it and fiercely

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 it down

God, the boring relative everyone ignores—no one calls, no one writes—until they need a serious favor.