House of Leaves (Paperback)

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."

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.

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.