Zampanò

Mark Z. Danielewski

A young family moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane, where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility - until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story: one of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams. This book was influenced, and was influenced by, the music of POE, the author's sister. Her album Haunted includes many songs inspired by this book.

Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves

I was actually thinking about this as I came across this passage. Danielewski does such a great job separating each narrator/author into their own writing style (which I know I and many other writers cannot do well).

Eli Alvah Huckabee

“I told him all those passages were inappropriate for a critical work, and if he were in my class I’d mark him down for it. But he’d just chuckle and continue. It bothered me a little but the guy wasn’t my student and he was blind and old, so why should I care?”

Sleep’s been stalking me for too long to remember.

Ever see yourself doing something in the past and no matter how many times you remember it you still want to scream stop, somehow redirect the action, reorder the present?  I feel that way now, watching myself tugged stupidly along by inertia, my own inquisitiveness or whatever else, and it must have been something else, though what exactly I have no clue, maybe nothing,

The monster wasn’t amused. It didn’t matter. The alcohol in me had already quickened and fled.  I stood there tingling all over, a dangerous clarity returning to me, ancient bloodlines colluding under what I imagine now must of been the very aegis of Mars, my fingers itching to weld into themselves, while directly beneath my sternum a hammer struck the timeless bell of war, a call to arms, though all of it still held back by what? words I guess, or rather a voice, though whose I have no clue.

Of course real horror does not depend upon the melodrama of shadows or even the conspiracies of night.

The walls are endlessly bare. Nothing hangs on them, nothing defines them. They are without texture. Even to the keenest eye or most sentient fingertip, they remain unreadable. You will never find a mark there. No trace survives. The walls obliterate everything. They are permanently absolved of all record. Oblique, forever obscure and unwritten. Behold the perfect pane thin of absence.

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

Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves quotes

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