The Reservoir: A Novella

Praise for The Reservoir: A Novella

In the former X-Files actor's fifth [book], a lonely ex-financier stuck in his apartment during the COVID-19 pandemic becomes obsessed with the Central Park Reservoir and slowly goes mad.


— New York Times Book Review

[Duchovny's] novella The Reservoir, set in New York City, probes how pandemic isolation has changed us.


— Boston Globe

Comically absurd, funny, and very dark.
— New York Journal of Books

A new, pandemic-inspired, Rear Window–esque thriller.


— Village Voice

Evocative, chilly prose that wouldn't be out of place in a late Don DeLillo novel. Like his previous novels Bucky F*cking Dent and Miss Subways, it's a love letter to Duchovny's native New York. But it's also a smart story about obsession. A slim, compelling tale of a man on the brink.


— Kirkus Reviews

David Duchovny’s existentialist novella is not to be missed. [The Reservoir] is a novel of many well-crafted and complex lines [and] Duchovny’s writing is a combination of high and low—and yes, that distinction still exists, if barely. His metaphors and similes are arresting . . . The Reservoir is an important novel for how it captures, not just where we are now, but where we are forever. Disease—like Covid, or like tuberculosis in The Magic Mountain—takes us on a journey outward and at the same time inward


— CityJournal

The progeny of our current pandemic is various: illness and death, of course, but also economic dislocation and personal isolation, the concept of ‘social distancing’ having quickly morphed from an advisory into a way of life. David Duchovny’s excellent new novella, The Reservoir, is a fever dream born out of this isolation.


— Popmatters

David Duchovny writes like Bob Dylan, but in prose. There’s irony, poetry, there’s social commentary. There’s a brooding outrage. And there’s romance, too. The complex, multilayered novella, The Reservoir . . . is an easy-to-read, hard-to-forget page-turner.


— The Pavlovic Today

Bump [The Reservoir] to the top of your summer reading list immediately.
— Culture Wag

Inspired by Duchovny’s self-reflection while sequestered in his own aerie above Central Park at the height of the pandemic, this work is provocative, challenging, and not without its moments of dark humor.
— Library Journal

This intelligent effort further burnishes Duchovny’s status as a gifted novelist.
— Publishers Weekly

This swift and unnerving fever-dream of a novella, Duchovny’s fifth work of fiction, is saturated with mythic and literary allusions and shaped by resonant riffs on Poe and Mann. At once philosophical and suspenseful, grandly imaginative and sharply funny, this mind-bending story of delusion and longing is a dark reflection of New York’s countless crimes and tragedies and much-tested resilience, emblematic of the suffering and tenacity of all of humanity.
— Booklist

This beautiful fever dream of a novella put me in mind of Gabriel García Márquez because of its sense of romance—and humor—in the midst of calamity. I’ll never look at Central Park the same way.
— Amanda Peet

A heartbreaking story of the cloaked complexities of father-daughter love framed as a sort of virtuoso suicide note. In its depiction of the breakthrough longings that come with growing older, it also struck me, wonderfully, as a contemporary Death in Venice.


— Walter Kirn, author of Blood Will Out

Biting and funny, The Reservoir is also deep and reflective. A mystery wrapped in a fever dream. A tale for our infectious times.
— Chris Carter, director/writer, creator of The X-Files

Equal parts Rear Window and The Plague, David Duchovny’s new novella is a wildly imaginative morality tale for these confounding times. With the Central Park Reservoir as his canvas, Duchovny paints a protagonist as quixotic as he is unreliable (or is he?). I had no idea where this story was headed, but I was down for the ride on every page