Sorry, you lost me back there! 
 I must say, as I begin writing this, that I am not sure of my eventual rating. Five stars for the way the book grabbed me at the beginning? Two stars for the unnumbered sixty-page chapter interpolated between chapters 93 and 94 that made me want to chuck the book in the trash? Four for the way she almost pulls it all together at the end? Back down to three for her inability to leave well enough alone even then? Those who have read 
 Special Topics in Calamity Physics 
 will know that Marisha Pessl has a beguiling way with words. They will also know that she takes her novels in directions you do not expect. That one started as a teenage search for personal identity (rather good at that, actually), morphed into a murder mystery, and morphed again into espionage, conspiracy theories, and goodness knows what. Her new one has more mutations than you can pin down, starting as a noir mystery and veering into cults, more conspiracies, and a heavy dose of the occult. Or apparently so; with Pessl, you can never know. It is like a roller-coaster enclosed in a haunted house; if you can accept novels as fairground rides, you will love this! 
 Stanislas Cordova is, or was, a notorious American director of horror films--so horrible that the studios refused to release them half-way into his career, and the last half-dozen were screened only in clandestine showings in places like the Paris Catacombs. Near the beginning of the book, Cordova's 24-year-old daughter Ashley, a former musical genius, is found dead in a deserted New York warehouse, apparently from suicide. Investigative reporter Scott McGrath, who has already been slapped with a lawsuit by the Cordova family, decides to look deeper. Before long, he is joined by a 19-year-old waif and a part-time drug dealer; this is quite implausible, but if you are looking for plausibility, you had better stop now. For the next 400 pages, the three of them chase clues all over New York State. 
 I was strongly reminded of a video game--not the especially violent ones, but the puzzle-solving kind in which mastery of one environment gains admittance to the next. For one thing, convoluted though the search might become, it is essentially linear; one thing always leads to the next, with no dead ends. People who start by yelling at the trio to get out will be talking more or less reasonably half a page later. Even when our investigators are shown the door, there is always someone coming out of the woodwork to tell them where to go next. Then Pessl has a fondness for wormholes: a discreet doorway in a luxury hotel leading to an even more exclusive one, neglected storefronts in dingy streets opening to treasure chambers beyond, old movie soundstages preserved in every detail, underground passages leading from one corner of an estate to the other like the diagonals in Clue. And, also in video-game style, there is the increasing strangeness of the environments themselves, Pessl's signature genre-morphing that I mentioned earlier. 
 Only she did it once or twice too often for me. I am prepared to suspend disbelief if I am having fun, but I do require some slight hold on reality. I can follow as the various species of sinister move from psychological to criminal and conspiratorial, but when we get to black magic and bargains with the Devil, I lose it. It all came to a head in that unnumbered chapter, inserted between jet black pages, a narrative black hole of sheer nightmare. Totally disorienting, but I found I simply didn't care. True, Pessl will pull herself out of the black hole with some skill, though her shift back toward rationality seemed almost anticlimactic. She has other skills too: a seamless inclusion of web-pages, photos, and other artifacts, and the sense to avoid opportunities for easy sex or sentimental resolutions. But you have to stick with her to appreciate these, and she lost me 200 pages back. I note that the book, even before publication, is already in pre-production as a movie, absolutely the right medium for it. Movie, video game, carnival ride--take your pick and enjoy. But it's not my idea of a novel.