The task of describing Cordova's own films in such a way that they justify the awestruck epithets heaped on them by the novel's characters, however, is too much for the author or at least Scott: they sound comically dull. Yes, there seems to be black magic afoot, and so the reader is encouraged to add films such as The Wicker Man and Kill List to a mental shortlist of other influences, which probably also include The Amityville Horror and Un Chien Andalou. A drugged-up ex-lover of Cordova's who seems to have stumbled into this story from a minor Tennessee Williams play generously gives Scott page upon page of flashback exposition in this style: 'Throughout history, alliances with the devil often manifest themselves in virtuosic mastery of an instrument.' Scott's poor taste in prose is evidently catching, because other characters he meets instantly begin talking in this robotically emphatic way as well. Or was she looking through me?' (Nah, she was probably just looking at you, mate.) Sometimes the italics seem forlornly to be trying to elevate a sentence from a kind of bland incompetence to a more baroque awfulness: ' That was women for you – always morphing.' (Here Scott has not encountered an actual morphing woman, like the one in the film Species who turns into an alien, but just a woman who has changed her mind.) Yet, I felt something else' (spoiler: it was another pocket.) He describes a woman 'staring down at me. 'I checked the inside pocket,' he relates at one point. He is addicted to italics, which festoon the pages, straining to turn ordinary words into jolts of surprise and excitement.

And for a once-successful magazine journalist, he's an alarmingly bad writer.

On the basis of a single anonymous phone call he had once – on live TV – more or less accused Cordova of being a child-murderer, and was then surprised to find his life falling apart and the work drying up. I say 'hero', but Scott is plainly a bit of an idiot.

Night film pessl