Customer Reviews

House of Leaves: A Novel

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I first heard of "House of Leaves" about a year ago on the Internet. Somebody said it was the best new horror novel they had read in years. Then when I started working at a bookstore in town, one of my new friends there told me it was the scariest book he had ever read.

All of this quite intrigued me. So I bought the book and read it over a period of about six months. It's not a quick read, or at least it wasn't for me. I had to have other, more normal, sane books going on at the same time. "House of Leaves" is over seven hundred pages long and it's loaded with literary detour signs, unespected landmines (some duds, some live), and good old "holding the book upside down in a mirror so you can read the words printed that way" fun.

"House of Leaves" is a contortionist's daydream, and a conservative reader's nightmare. I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum and found myself admiring the new unhallowed ground Danielewski was breaking, but at other times longing for a more conventional, satisfying structure.

This whole thing is very postmodern. The house is aware of itself as a house, and the book is aware of itself as a book. There is a story of a family moving into a house, trying to sort out its interpersonal demons, and finding that the insides of things (lives, minds, houses) can often be darker, scarier, stranger, and more convoluted than they would appear from the outsides.

That alone would have made a great book, told with inventive language and a compelling psychological subtext.

But that's just the beginning, the backstory really. "House of Leaves" is a story inside a story inside a story, etc. In fact, it puts the dizzying structure of Mary Shelly's "Frankenstein" to shame.

In "House of Leaves," there's a young guy named Johnny Truant who's acting as literary editor, presenting the compelling and disturbing scribblings and ramblings on an old man named Zampano. Zampano's papers, which are presented posthumously, recount, at times blow-for-blow, a documentary film called "The Navidson Record" of a family moving into a house which proves to be larger on the inside than it is on the outside.

There is also another editor above Johnny, who makes comments on top of Johnny's comments. Johnny finds himself wondering if the old man didn't just make up the whole story about the young family moving into the house, because Johnny is unable to find any corroborating scrap of proof that the film exists.

Of course, add into the mix that Johnny is a self-admitted fibber and story teller extroidinaire. He tells us how much fun he has making up completely bogus stories for the benefit of strangers her meets in bars.

Knowing this, the reader has to start to wonder if the old man, Zampano, even exists, or if he's just an invention of Johnny's. And if you follow that line of thinking too far, you might even start to wonder if the heavy black book you're holding exists.

This is the haunted house that's in the film that the old man made up and wrote about as if it were as real as he was, but who was really just a figment of the narrator's fertile imagination, the narrator that doesn't really exist, except on paper and in the reader's mind and imagination...so maybe none of it exists...or all of it does. Maybe the house has turned on its porch lights somewhere deep, deep inside of you, down all those twisting tunnels and swirling, dark echoing caves.

Maybe there's a sign out front. "For Sale By Owner." And under that, in small print, in French, upside down and backwards, "Buyer Beware."

I had never heard of this book when I picked it up, and I'm glad. I actually meant to order another book from my book club, but ordered this one mistakenly. My first thought was "House of Leaves, that looks boring, maybe I can give it as a gift". Then I saw the quotes on the back by some of my favorite authors and wondered if I should give it a chance. Then I flipped through it and was interested by the way the book was put together. Then I read the description on the inside cover (which is mostly fictional) about the book being a collection of papers that circulated for a while on the internet, but had never been put together in a book format before, and the story about a house whose dimensions keep changing, and I was intrigued.

This is definitely a challenging read, in that it demands your full attention. In a couple places, it tells you to skip to the appendices and read a certain section, then return to where you were. The narrative goes back and forth between Johnny Truant's first person narrative (told in sections and footnotes) of how the book, by an elderly blind man who lived in his apartment complex and may not have been entirely sane, came into his possession and what it has done to his mind and his life, and the story told by the blind man about...about...you know, this is really a hard book for me to describe. It has stories within stories, about 800 different typefaces (it must have driven the typesetters, or whoever did the formatting at the publishing house, crazy) and formats that include interviews, bibliographiess, letters, transcripts, and even a section where there are just photographs of different scraps of paper. I probably had the most fun with the letter from Johnny Truant's mother that you actually have to take a pen and decode, because you have to take the first letter of every word and stick them together. I tried doing it my head, but was too tired, and ended up getting a pen and just taking the time to write it out and then read it. Unlike some of the unusual stuff in the book that really turned out to be meaningless or a dead end, the decoded letter turned out to be frightening (I actually had to toss the piece of paper it was written out on because I was worried someone would think I wrote it and had lost my mind).

This wasn't the scariest book I've ever read, but certain parts were very, very creepy and unsettling. Ever since I read The Legend of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, the idea of a house where the measurements don't quite add up or actually change has scared the bejeezus out of me. True, you never see a monster, but to me, what you can imagine is always scarier than anything the author can dream up-the fear of the unseen. It's what scared some people so bad about The Blair Witch Project (dang it-I was hoping I could review this book without mentioning that movie!) I'm glad I read it at home where I could give it my full attention and not have people staring at me when I turned the book sideways and upside down and even turning it in spirals to follow the bizarrely formatted text. I'm also glad I read it before I read any reviews or heard any hype about it whatsoever, unlike the Blai---arrrgh! I did it again. I did have trouble getting into "The Navidson Record", but it proved interesting. I didn't have any trouble getting into the Johnny Truant narrative--especially since the style of writing reminded me of the way Skipp and Spector used to write together (I really miss them).

Recommended for those looking for something different, or who want to read something that is engrossing enough to 'escape'. Also recommended to horror fans with an open mind. Not recommended reading, however, if you feel woozy or have a headache. For instance, every time the word 'house' is written, the typeface is slightly lighter than the rest of the text, and at first I couldn't tell if I were imagining it or not. I also made the mistake of trying to read part of the book when I was getting over an ear infection and still had some 'vertigo'- I had to put it down because rotating the book back and forth was starting to make me feel like I had the bedspins. If you're bored and want to read something different and challenging, and amusing? Definitely recommended.

This postmodern, typographically chaotic novel is a monstrous book, both in page numbers and ambition. It is the literary equivalent of "The Ring." As we learn in the introduction, Johnny Truant, a tattoo parlor employee, has come into possession of a trunk full of bizarre scraps of paper once owned by an old blind man, Zampano, now dead. The papers comprise an exploration of a cult film called "The Navidson Record" and its sub-films, documentaries about an ever-expanding house that's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside and which consumes the lives of anyone who enters its dark hallways or watches the tapes. Johnny becomes himself obsessed with Zampano's papers and, in turn, with the Navidson house. He is haunted by the beast he smells and the descending madness he had no inclination to stop. The book itself is the melding of Zampano's papers, Johnny's footnote digressions into his own life and its troubles, and the debate among academics as they struggle to make sense of a film that probably never existed. The result is a dark, wild, often hilarious, sometimes excruciatingly boring foray into the meaning of home, family, love, and self.

The structure of the novel is innovative, with Johnny Truant's story unfolding in footnotes and in the appendices, while Zampano describes the film and the academics bicker over its meaning in the body. The most riveting narrative thread in this novel is of Navidson's and others' descents into the smooth walled, dark cavern of the mysterious hallway. The consequences on Navidson's marriage and on those he loves are devastating, and the reader is swept into both the horror and the need for hope. Johnny's story is less compelling, especially as the house fades into the background and his story takes over. The academic over-analysis is tons of fun - as long as you have the patience to get over the dryness to find the kernel it has been working toward. For example, early in the book, Danielewski (in the writings of Zampano) provides a lengthy academic discussion of the myth of Echo and its scientific and literary significance, only to derail it with a Johnny Truant footnote telling the reader that "Frankly I'd of rec'd a quick skip past the whole echo ramble were it not for those six lines . . ."

Even more bizarre than the telling of Truant's tale in footnotes is the typographical methods used to visually evoke the house in the Navidson Record. The words become their own labyrinth, with "hallways" of text enclosed in blue boxes; they sometimes inhabit corners only, or skip up and down the pages, one or two words at a time. When the characters don't know which way is up, the reader is twisting and turning the physical book to read upside down and sideways. You have to see the book to fully appreciate the visual hijinks Danielewski uses. It can take a long time to read certain sections, only to find that you can flip through several pages with just a glance at each.

Despite the suspenseful plot, HOUSE OF LEAVES is anything but a quick read. Its satisfaction is derived more from its individual parts than as a whole since it ends, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, not with a bang but a whimper. I recommend this for patient readers and for those who delight in experimental turns in fiction.

I was attracted to House of Leaves because of an article about it in Newsweek. That sent me to this site, where I found the critics polarized: Joe Pro loved it, Joe Shmoe hated it. I had to find out for myself!

If you're like me and don't usually use words such as "metafiction" and "no vivifying center," I just want to say, the book was a total hoot. At times trying, yes. But so is Monty Python--I think it takes that experimental attitude to reach the breakthrough stuff. Contrary to other reviewers, I found the central narrative genuinely eerie, much more so than anything I've read by Steven King or Dean Koontz. In some places I was turning the pages breathlessly. At the same time, I found myself chuckling with delight at pages that are typeset to match the scenes they describe. For example, in one scene where explorers are hopelessly lost, the pages feature dense footnotes in random columns -- some even printed upside-down, some backwards. As you try to puzzle out what to read next, you suddenly realize you are experiencing some of the same disorientation as the explorers. I think this is just plain old fun. The author purposely interrupts the story in places to frustrate you; saves some of the best stuff for obscure appendixes (be sure to read the letters from Johnny Truant's institutionalized Mom); and generally challenges your assumptions about what a book is supposed to do or be. At the same time, for the most part he delivers the goods in the old-fashioned narrative sense.

So, yeah, it takes a little work to read, and it's not conventional, and it's not perfect. But it's ORIGINAL. I'm REALLY glad I bought it. I enjoyed it a ton, and the emotions of the book continue to resonate with me days after finishing it. If any of you reading this enjoyed David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, as I did, House of Leaves is simply a must.And, if you are tired of slick, predictable stories that give you nothing to think about, I think you should give House of Leaves a chance.

It takes guts to build up a work as "life changing" in your own introduction, and I admit I was hesitant about reading the rest of the book. On a purely technical level, House of Leaves is amazing. The author's use of form to accentuate his story is complex, and shifts from hitting-you-over-the-head to very subtle. He managed to convince me that the texts of Zampano and Truant (and Truant's mother) came from different people by keeping their writing styles distinct. These things are indicators of remarkable talent.

Technical ability aside, Danielewski seems so taken with the process of writing that he forgot what he was writing about. Truant and Zampano's lives are affected, but why? Who cares? The Navidsons were slightly more real, with less textbook characteristics, and were easier to empathize with. There were many places that were difficult to convince myself of the necessity to keep reading.

There are many intriguing things about this novel and about the sheer volume of ideas pouring out of Danielewski's head. He doesn't rank amongst the great writers of genre-defining fiction yet, but with time and polishing of his considerable skills I believe he very well could. The book is worth a read, probably even two. But it's not life-changing.

Let me first make a suggestion - before you read this book, or even this review, consider the normal state of entertainment in America. Take your favorite play, book, movie or TV show. Consider how the plot or story line is developed. While there might be a flashback to another time, or a "red herring" to throw you off, the story almost always lays out in a straight line - it's linear. Mystery, solution - conflict, climax. Wrap it up in 22 minutes and see you next week. Please, go ahead, test this theory with any book you choose. Read it and when you're finished, plot out the story line. Then read House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski and try the same thing. That's what I've done in preparing this review, and have discovered the following: 1) I can't finish. I can read all the pages, in any order I choose, over and over again, but I can not say I'm done. I may never be done 2) I can tell you some of the story lines, I just don't know how many there are. I've found at least four - three in my first reading, and another in the second. There seems to be a fifth and sixth one trying to be unearthed if I look hard enough. I stopped plotting them out after creating two polygons, a circle and one somewhat straight line, that connects a point on the circle to one of the polygons. 3) Don't wait for the movie . It would have to be 3 days long, and it could only be viewed on videotape by yourself so you could rewind and review when you had a question.

As you might have guessed, House of Leaves is not very linear, and definitely not for everybody. Mark Danielewski seems to have done everything possible to stop you from reading. 700+ pages first filled with type that suddenly goes upside down, sideways, backwards , even down to one letter on a page. Three different kinds of footnotes come in three different typefaces, and they can't be skipped, because most of the story is there, along with mountains of superfluous information. Determining which is which is part of the fun. This is a review, so I supposed I must try to answer the question What's it about? Perhaps it's the story of a paranormal experiences of a house which is larger inside than outside. Or perhaps it's the story of the movie about that house. Or perhaps it's the story of the review of the movie about the house, written over a 20 year period by a blind mystery man. Ostensibly, it's about the young man who finds the unfinished manuscript and extensive research notes of the review of the movie about the house, the young man who felt compelled to finish it for the mystery man, who dies at the beginning of the book. Or perhaps it's the story of the young man himself as the decision to finish the book throws his life into chaos. (Okay, there are the four story lines I found. The fifth is about the young man's relationship with his mother and her mental condition, and the sixth has something to do with mythology, I think)

Ignore the "novel" designation on the cover - this book is real. Danielewski's genius is not in the story or the confusion of style, it's in his expert ability to suck you into his world. I was hooked instantly, and have to fight to remember that it's not a true story. Danielewski has created something that is so original in style and story that comparisons are almost impossible ( I can only think of one - "He writes like David Lynch makes movies." But that doesn't do either of them justice and probably won't get me a blurb in the advertisements for the next printing.) Should you read it? Only if you have lots of time and patience, and the urge to discover something before everybody else. But if you do chose to read it, take the advice of a (very) minor character in the book who has read the book - at least three of them have. As he hands it over he warns "Be careful. It will change your life." It has mine.

How does one describe a book like this?

Start here: "House of Leaves" is a book that's bigger on the inside than it is outside. It isn't a book to be read from the first page to the last -- It's more a story to be explored, and it's a story about exploration. In nearly every aspect, how you read the book is a direct reflection of what's going on in the story at that point.

The story itself is complex. It's written on one level like an academic text, distant and carefully-worded, but on another level like a person's diary, full of intimate details and rambling passages. The academic portion is by an author we know only as Zampano, and it's an analysis of a film, "The Navidson Record," about a family who moves into a new house, and the house begins to change around them. First it changes in subtle ways, adding a quarter-inch to the interior dimensions without adding anything to the outside dimension. Like the book itself, the house is larger inside than out...MUCH larger, as the family discovers when new hallways are discovered where none should be, and a door appears in the living room which leads to untold depths. The house seems to be unsteady, changing itself from moment to moment, and it begins to consume the lives of the people living in it.

As if that's not enough, there's the additional layer of story of the young man who finds the fragments of Zampano's book after Zampano has died, and assembles it, making additional notes on sections, many of which branch into detailed descriptions of his own life and problems. This young man, Johnny Truant, becomes every bit as important to the story as the Navidsons and the house they live in, as elements of that story tie back into his story.

And then there's how the story is told, which in this case is every bit as important as the story itself. You'll start the book at the first page and everything looks normal enough. Perhaps you'll notice a few oddities in the early chapters, but for the most part you're still comfortable. Then it starts doing unexpected things. Footnotes refer to additional footnotes which refer to previous footnotes. You may find yourself following one note through several pages, only to find another note leading you back to where you started, moving backward and forward through the book to follow the trail. Then the text itself starts shifting around, pages printed upside-down or sideways or diagonally or backwards... sometimes several of these combined onto a single page. You'll have to physically turn the book this way and that to be able to read everything. Pacing changes with the story as well. Sometimes things are happening fast, and you'll read at a breakneck pace, 50 pages in 10 minutes or less. At other times, you're forced to linger over the same three or four pages for half an hour to catch the nuances of meaning contained there. And all of it, every bit, is tailored to reflect what's going on in the story in how you're reading it.

Put simply, this is a book that's not just written, it's designed. And it's a masterpiece.

The book I'm most closely reminded of, in terms of the story of the house on Ash Tree Lane, is Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House." The concept of a house which is not haunted by ghosts, but which is itself alive and possibly malevolent, is shared in many ways by both books. "House of Leaves" a haunted house story in which the monster (if there is one at all) never makes a real appearance, but its presence is always felt. From this perspective alone, this is one of the most effectively unsettling books I've ever read.

The way the story is told only adds to the effect, by turns surprising, delightful, and scary in the way it makes you read. It's a book to be read actively, aware and awake...to be explored with eyes wide open. It's exhausting. It's exhilirating.

Adding a further layer to the book is a CD that goes hand in hand with the book: "Haunted" by Poe. Written and performed mainly by the sister of Mark Danielewski, the author of "House of Leaves," the music adds to the experience of the story. Tracks like "5 & 1/2 Minute Hallway" and "Amazed" have clear and obvious parallels to the book, but other songs like "Haunted" and "If You Were Here" have even more powerful thematic links to it. Listening to the music on "Haunted" can lead to deeper understanding of the story in "House of Leaves," even as it adds further mystery. The music provides even more avenues for exploration.

When I finished "House of Leaves" (meaning I have read all the pages), I was left feeling drained. I've rarely been as satisfied or challenged by a book as I have by this one, and at the same time part of me wants to go back in and explore it all over again to find the passages of meaning I had missed the first time through, and perhaps the hidden things that I never would have seen otherwise. I can understand the obsession, the need to explore that house that keeps changing, because the book is very much like that. I can't claim to understand it all yet, but it's only my first time through it. I'm sure I'll be back to explore and lose myself in its pages again, someday.

Mark Z. Danielewski shows amazing talent as a storyteller in the pseudo-scholarly analysis of a fictional documentary created by Pullitzer winning photojournalist Will Navidson.

Documenting the explorations of a mysterious dark hallway that randomly appeared in his new house, the Navidson Record stirs a controversy in the academic world involving everyone from mathemeticians, to literary scholars, to pop-culture icons from Stephen King to Camille Paglia. This controversy is documented by an enigmatic blind man, Zampano.

This nested retelling of the horrors of the Navidson House on Ash Tree Lane is once again nested in the retelling of how this scholarly discussion of an apparently fabricated work affects the life of the man who discovers Zampano's manuscript and sets about compiling it, Johnny Truant.

The base story of House of Leaves, that of Navidson and his obsession with the mysterious hallway that seems to shift and morphy within the impossible physical limitations of his household is strangely drawing. You might question how endless explorations of a cold hallway with uniform black ashen walls might continue to be interesting, but the outpouring of emotion resulting from the concept of humanity in overwhelming circumstances allows Danielewski an opportunity to show his strengths as a storyteller. How this enigmatic hallway can bring out Karen's insecurities, the darkness that lies in the psyche of two children, the fear of failure in a tough as nails hunter, and the love of true brothers is amazing.

However, this fascinating and engaging story is ultimately ruined by Danielewski's hodge-podge efforts to complicate the book. The story is often broken up by long in-depth, and often seemingly pointless analysis and commentary from experts in various fields as well as by the sexual and chemical escapades of our third narrarator Johnny Truant. Although all of this is loosely tied together through strings of footnotes and parallel emotions and occurances, it's all too much. It interrupts the suspense from building the story of the Navidson Record ruining what could have been a superb thriller.

Furthermore, frequent defiance of novelistic form such as slanted writing and footnotes within footnotes seems almost gimmicky at this point. It seems as if Danielewski not only embraces these transgressions, while at the same time satirizing the tendency for analyzation within the postmodernist vein.

Frankly, Danielewski appears to be a talent with much potential. However, this effort is so full with so many ideas, plot lines, gimmicks, and characters that have just been almost pointlessly spewed on the pages that the originality of the original story has been lost.

As the Amazon.com reviewer suggested, we've all been freed from the conventions of the novelistic form. Danielewski insists on beating us over the head with that freedom until we can hardly see why such freedom was interesting in the first place.

If you like the movies Fight Club or Mullholland Drive, you'd probably get a kick out of this novel. Following the multi-layered plot of House of Leaves is sometimes difficult, but if you piece together the multiple plot lines of the entire novel, the overlapping thematic strands are quite interesting, and pretty obvious. It's not your average Harry Potter read (no offense intended to fans); there's quite some depth to the book, and in looking into a general overview of the author's life at the time he wrote it, one understands that the book speaks of the figurative inner labryinths of our minds and consciousness through the literal descriptions of the maze of the house. It's a unique and experimental novel, and plays with your head (in a good way). The narrator and the book he's talking about are represented simultaneously in the text, so I recommend reading a few pages of Johnny's story, a few of Zampano's, and go back and forth as such (don't read all of one story and then all of the other - it won't make any sense that way). The parallels between the two stories are intriguing, and in the end you'll understand what's up with Johnny. The format of the book alone is art; very original, very postmodern. If you're into different areas of art weaving together, I suggest listening to his sister Poe's cd Haunted before reading the book (to better understand the psychological basis for the novel). Reading the poetry in the back of the book also clarifies the theme and plot a bit more. I suggest not reading about the house as a literal object, but as a symbol for the inner workings of the mind - it will make more sense that way. Scary, provoking, and wickedly original, House of Leaves will weave in and out of your consciousness for months after reading.

The horror of horror stories (and by implication ghost stories, haunted house stories, creepy stories of any kind) pretty much starts to fade the instant anything definite gets said. If you hint at what the peculiar shapes made by the shadow in the corner of the room may mean, it's (possibly) terrifying. If you come all out and say, "boo, look, it's a monster!" It stops being scary. Monsters aren't scary. Nobody believes in book monsters (could be half to do with the fact that there are far enough monsters out there in the big bad world).

The trick to fear (book fear, at any rate) is - keep the rabbit in the hat. The rabbit only ever disappoints. Tell us you've got something in the hat. Go on about it if you have to. Lie if that's the best you can do (so it's a rabid, bionic, nuclear, fifty-foot high rabbit, then . . .). Just don't give the game away.

Danielewski has learned the trick, and "House of Leaves" is shadowplay atop shadowplay (an enormous shadowy black house that defies physical laws by existing within another perfectly ordinary suburban house). A horror story that obeys the fundamental laws of prestidigitation : obfuscation, sleight of hand, distraction. He doesn't even tell the story himself. (Hell, it isn't even a story, in the strictest definition of the word.) Johnny Truant - an LA tattoo dude - tells you about how he and his friend Lude discovered this manuscript in an old dead guy (Zampano)'s apartment. The manuscript tells you about this film - The Navidson Report - that Johnny Truant thinks doesn't even exist.

The film that the manuscript tells you about is made by Will Navidson, an award-winning photo-journalist. Navidson intended to make a documentary about family life. He bought a house. Stationed cameras roundabout. Recorded what followed. Only what followed wasn't what he expected. A door appears out of nowhere upon the living room wall (a living room wall that is flush with the outside world). You open the door and what do you see? Not the outside world, that's for sure. A ten foot black corridor. You follow the ten foot black corridor. Where does it go? Another longer corridor full of closed doors. You ignore the doors and follow the corridor. It leads you into a great hall. Through the great hall into a vast hall. Through the vast hall to a staircase that takes you eight hours to walk down. You're a little freaked out by now so you decide to make your way back. Only nothing is as it was when you first passed through. The stairs are only ten feet high. Doors have moved around. Corridors have moved, lengthened, shortened. The living room isn't where it was. The shape of everything changes and what is that sound? Sounds like a creature roaring back there somewhere.

The book itself doesn't keep shape : aside of the Braille, the 'lost' text (pages Johnny cannot find, pages Johnny spills ink on), burn-holes in the manuscript that obliterate letters and words, blood and claw marks, there are sentences that run across the gutter and fill two pages, words that are set diagonally at the page edge or compressed in small boxes (as the space within the house compresses). There is the now infamous 'labyrinth' chapter (footnotes in boxes, upside down, sideways, following page numbers, reversing page numbers). There are quotes in Italian, in German, in Spanish, in Latin, in Russian, in French. There are translations. The Zampano manuscript is a regular Babel (or rather, the razed foundations of a Babel, what's left after the end).

Only it isn't just the manuscript (or the film) you have to contend with. This is a book that has been edited to include emailed comments from characters involved in the action from after the second edition of the book (girls Johnny and Lude have slept with who don't approve of their inclusion). Navidson is filtered (if he's real) through Zampano (if he's real) through Truant, through an editorial team, through a publishing house, through the Internet.

It's neither either/or nor both/and. It's a new kind of game (on a very old board). Sort of : chess played on a Brancusi spiral with Giacometti figurines. Which for the most part is lots of crazy fun (you're reading, holding the book sideways on, turning everything upside down, reading 90 pages in about ten minutes). It's not perfect - parts of the 'Labyrinth' chapter are laborious, some of Zampano's extemporisation is plain boring and could have been cut (regardless of what Truant alleges, Dave Eggar-style in footnotes) and there are way too many footnotes - but, overall, by the time you (don't) get to the Scooby Doo-style unmasking, you've enjoyed the ride and - yes - seen genuinely unsettling things here.

You develop a kind of theory as to what the Book of Leaves is (leaves = pages = the book of books), which leads you to realise this isn't a horror story at all - it's a kind of skit (like Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night, a Traveller"). Not a trick, more a clever-clever (ab)use of genre. Which is fine. And entertaining. And different (which is cool).