Mark Z. Danielewski

Johnny Truant wild and troubled sometime employee in a LA tattoo parlour, finds a notebook kept by Zampano, a reclusive old man found dead in a cluttered apartment. Herein is the heavily annotated story of the Navidson Report. Will Navidson, a photojournalist, and his family move into a new house. What happens next is recorded on videotapes and in interviews. Now the Navidsons are household names. Zampano, writing on loose sheets, stained napkins, crammed notebooks, has compiled what must be the definitive work on the events on Ash Tree Lane. But Johnny Truant has never heard of the Navidson Record. Nor has anyone else he knows. And the more he reads about Will Navidson's house, the more frightened he becomes. Paranoia besets him. The worst part is that he can't just dismiss the notebook as the ramblings of a crazy old man. He's starting to notice things changing around him . . . Immensely imaginative. Impossible to put down. Impossible to forget. House of Leavesis thrilling, terrifying and unlike anything you have ever read before.

House of Leaves

Cheryl Hedlund

Anna Oeltjenbruns

[Animals] lack a symbolic consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being .. reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the nost sun-filled days-that's something else.

Clara Gauthier

Thus it would appear the ghost haunting The Navidson Record, continually bashing against the door, is none other than the reoccurring threat of its own reality.

God’s a house. Which is not to say that our house is God’s house or even a house of God. What I mean to say is that our house is God. 

I will become, I have become, a creature unstirred by history, no longer moved by the present, just hungry, blind and at last full of mindless wrath.

james cao

Tom gets by, Navidson succeeds. Tom just wants to be, Navidson must become. And yet despite such obvious differences, anyone who looks past Tom's wide grin and considers his eyes will find surprisingly deep pools of sorrow. Which is how we know they are brothers, because like Tom, Navidson's eyes share the same water.

 As science writer and sometime theologian David Conte wrote: "God for all intents and purposes is an equal sign, and at least up until now, something humanity has always been able to believe in is that the universe adds up."

the realization of what Sleep has just now delivered, that bloody handmaiden, this time her toiling fingers wet with boiling deformation, oozing in the mutilations of birth, heartless and unholy, black with afterbirth

Myth makes Echo the subject of longing and desire. Physics makes Echo the subject of distance and design. Where emotion and reason concerned both claims are accurate.

And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love. There is only silence. 

 exist without the experience of itself? Is it possible to think of that place as “unshaped” by human perceptions?

House of Leaves quotes

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