Name: Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves
Rating: 4.132478632478633 (234 reviews)
ISBN: 9780375420528

Mark Z. Danielewski

Zampanò

A family relocates to a small house on Ash Tree Lane and discovers that the inside of their new home seems to be without boundaries

Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves

House of leaves

Bárbara Borba

Tim Pendry

'House of Leaves' is another proof of Pendry's theorem - that any book that has two or more pages of laudatory encomiums by the great and good of modern intellectual life provided by the Publisher is inevitably going to have been over-rated. As a rule, it has rarely failed me. In this case, we have the intellectual class doing what it does best - talking to itself with knowing winks and nods and a determination to keep the riff-raff out from its anxious halls - because the book is interesting, extremely clever but mostly rather shallow. As an intellectual and intense tour de force, it is undoubtedly impressive but one ends up dissatisfied with what amounts to a cynical and extended joke at the expense of the intellectual and academic community whose fawning over it suggests that they have not fully understood what is going on. Perhaps they think that it is about other intellectuals and not about them. The Publisher's selection suggests a certain blindness to their own situation. The book is not 'deeply frightening' or 'demonically brilliant', it is merely very very clever. The bulky tome comprises two main narratives and a plethora of notes on notes as notes or as appendices. All the paraphrenalia of elite liberal mental existence is here ... the cross-referencing between the few, the slavish adherence to provenance, the scholastic turn of mind. The first narrative is a narrative about a narrative - Zampano's sometimes dry account of a purported documentary by a celebrity photo-journalist concerning a 'horror house' with a life of its own that provides entry into a labyrinth that defies normal understanding of time and space. The documentary is clearly an invention. It fits into the 'Blair Witch' meme of found footage but is embedded in turn in a literary bourgeois fiction of a troubled marriage. This is all embedded in turn in a system of academic notes and investigation close at times to the laughable. In these notes intellectuals (one has to ask who pays for all this intensity of nonsense) squabble over the meaning of mere hints of words in the ur-text (the documentary). Zampano plays his role by earnestly reporting these squabbles as if they mattered. It is, of course, invention. Zampani himself is decidedly inauthentic - a possibly unhinged recluse who cannot possibly have had access to the range of data he exhaustively (and at times boringly) provides in order to elucidate what is also a Borgesian parody. But these many absurdities and parodies are intentional. They are the joke. Yet, underneath all this wasteful gloss lies one of the best weird tales I have ever read - Danielewski can write and his (Zampunco's tale) of Navidson's explorations of the house-labyrinth is stunningly good. If this basic underlying imagined story of the horror of being drawn into something close to the hell envisaged by the Mesopotamians was shorn of the New York literary elite novel of family torment and all the pseudo-academic accretions it might be one of the finest weird tales in the canon. The second text is that of one 'Johnny Truant', also unreliable but without the same academic attention given to it. This is equally clever and equally raddled with inauthenticities - notably by giving us a Californian slacker with a propensity to talk like a 'literary figure' when he wants to. This narrative is about the man who 'orders' the Zampano manuscript (the core text) and apparently either goes mad (presumably like his mother) or is haunted by horror arising from a text which might have done for Zampano himself. Vagueness and incoherence are a tactic here. The skill of the Johnny Truant section is only that Danielewski has stitched in - often seamlessly - many different American horror memes much as 'An American Horror Story' tries to do: monsters, madness, texts that haunt, dark dreams, sociopathic violence, hints of mass killing to come. This is a less satisfactory text because it is also fundamentally parodic, this time of the more modern American horror novel set in a world of sex, violence, tattoos, guns, the underclass, drugs, narcissism and the road trip. Johnny Truant is no more real than Zampano. His 'voice' can shift too easily from low-life to learned and intellectual, even if self-deprecating. The hint of violence is not actually fulfilled and the sexual adventures pornographic and largely absurd - strippers and low life stuff. If Zampano's narrative shifts into the hollowness of celebrity middle class family life where the kids are noticeable for the disregard paid to them, Johnny Truant's narrative is that of a disregarded kid with a mad and dangerous mother who slips into a very different underworld. The book (a thumpingly large volume at around 650 pages) uses a lot of typographical tricksiness and inventiveness (Sterne has been cited), including blank or near-blank pages, to make its extended point. It ends up with a large appendix to give the illusion that this fakery has some bottom to it. The appendices include the letters from yet another inauthentic narrator, Truant's mad mother (who manages to quote Anglo-Saxon texts in the original), to her son before her death. These have little to do with the core narrative and simply muddy the waters in relation to Truant himself. If you read the book, you will soon have to learn that it is no crime to skip large sections of it otherwise you will go mad with boredom. One's suspicion is that the joke at the expense of the intelligensia is made all the funnier by the possibility that the latter will take all the guff seriously. A brilliant weird tale that would make a possibly canonical novella has been used as the basis for a satire of the class to which Danielewski belongs. Credit must be given to Danielewski for the brilliance with which he has played his multi-layered 'labyrinthine' game. What are we left with at the end of all this? A very extended (all 640 and more pages) joke that forces us into moments of necessary ennui (and where the intellectuals who read the book seem not to have fully understood just how much the author is playing them) is interesting but a bit of a dead-end. I can recommend the book if you are not part of that closed circle of litterateurs but only if you read the chapters relating directly to the contents of the Navidson documentary, perhaps follow Johnny Truant's adventures, and just speed-read your way through all the clever trickery. Unless you are a Professor of Literature, of course, or mainstream media literary critic, in which case I am sure you can spin some justification for your professional existence from its content - if you can do so with a straight face.

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

Sarah Sammis

Jason Lo

Tobias V. Langhoff

This is a book about an academic paper about a documentary film about a house that’s bigger on the inside than the outside.

The structure of the book is hard to describe. At its core it’s a “found footage” story. The book House of Leaves itself is presented as a frame story written by Johnny Truant, a junkie who works in a tattoo parlor, and how he finds an academic paper in the estate of the recently deceased Zampanò, a blind hermit a friend of his was acquainted with. The book contains notes by Johnny Truant on how he catalogued and compiled Zampanò’s notes after his death. This is made clear on the book’s title page and colophon, which do not carry Danielewski’s name. So the book itself is, from the title page, metafictional. Zampanò’s academic paper is just one of many long analyses and dissertations (many of which the paper cites) on an intriguing documentary film called The Navidson Record, which is itself a “found footage” film akin to The Blair Witch Project about a supernatural house. The paper mostly has a dry, academic style, but also experiments with form and genre, as well as retells the film scene by scene with analysis. What gives the book its unique structure is mostly the paper’s numerous annotations by Truant, many about his own (drug-fueled) life and how he descends into madness while reading the paper, footnotes from the editors who published Truant’s book, as well as footnotes and citations – which in turn also have their own annotations and footnotes – to the other academic material about the film. However, neither the film nor this other scientific work actually exist. Of course, they don’t exist in real life, but they also don’t exist in the universe of the framing story.

Or do they? In the documentary The Navidson Record, a film by renowned explorer, film-maker and photographer Will Navidson about how he explores a mysterious cavernous hallway inside his house, he at one point reads the only book he brought with him on one of the explorations – House of Leaves. A metafictional full circle. Either Johnny Truant secretly re-wrote parts of Zampanò’s paper to include references to his completed encompassing work House of Leaves; Johnny named his book after this book-within-a-book and padded his notes to make the description of the book fit; or Zampanò actually originally wrote about Navidson reading a book which did not at that point exist yet. Which case is true is up to the reader to decide. (As well as, of course, whether or not Navidson actually existed and did read any book at all while exploring the house.)

The supernatural house that’s explored in the documentary and paper is bigger on the inside than on the outside (a feature cleverly referenced on the paperback edition’s cover), and contains a labyrinth of dark hallways that constantly shift and change locations. The novel’s structure is clearly meant to reflect both the physical properties of the house as well as Truant’s psyche; he is prone to go off on rambling tangents and seems to slowly unravel as he reads Zampanò’s paper. He becomes obsessed with the house, as did Navidson, the subject of the paper and the house’s inhabitant. I was reminded of Ted the Caver, a creepypasta about a man who is consumed by a mysterious cave, and also of the video game Layers of Fear a little.

Many seem to be put off by the boring academic style of writing which comprises the bulk of the book, but I thought it was great. It’s not as dry as it seems to be in the beginning. As that part of the story progresses, it becomes even more labyrinthine than just the nested footnotes. And while many find the sections about Johnny Truant to be annoying diary excerpts about a punk who has a lot of sex and takes a lot of drugs (and they’re right), the progression of this part of the story is also very good. It culminates in an appendix after the main story which contains a lot of letters sent to Johnny from his mother, who is in an asylum, a character who was barely mentioned in the main story but who adds a lot of interesting analysis to the unreliable narrative we have been reading. It also reveals that there are codes hidden in the book by explicitly revealing an acrostic (first letter of each word spells a hidden message), which it turns out is prevalent throughout the rest of the text as well. There’s also a stand-alone sequel to this appendix (which contains all the letters in this one, and also some new ones) called The Whalestoe Letters.

The story isn’t really a horror story; it’s not, at least, classically horrific. It’s more of a suspense story (to the extent it even is a story), with a very unnerving atmosphere. It’s a hard read, both because of the academic prose that comprises the bulk of the book, but also because it forces you to read and re-read passages, consult endless footnotes-within-footnotes, analyze, decipher codes, etc. It took me a couple of months to get through, with a lot of time spent thinking about it (and, afterwards, reading about it online).

Not sure what else to say. You should read this book. It’s for you. If you like it as much as I did and become as obsessed with it as Johnny Truant did, you should check out the official discussion forums, which are full of interesting theories that I didn’t think of while reading but which make a lot of sense. Who is the minotaur? Does Johnny even exist? If he does, his last name is implied to not be “Truant”; but is it really _____? Who was his father? His mother’s last name, Lièvre, is at one point misspelled “livre”, which means “book”. Significant? She also knows about Zampanò somehow, as revealed by careful reading and deciphering. What is Mark Z. Danielewski’s middle name? Et cetera. You could also check out The Idiot’s Guide to House of Leaves if you didn’t understand squat.

The book also has a musical soundtrack of sorts: The album 
  Haunted
 by Poe, the author’s sister (who appears briefly in the story, as does her band in another section).

Mia McCoy

Natalie

I oscillated between despising and liking this.

Incredibly ambitious in scope, House of Leaves raises several questions. How can narrative be manipulated by its typography and form? How do we determine what is true? What does art reveal about the artist and those who perceive the art? Etc. Though admirable, it makes the narrative(s) lack focus.

This quote (pg. 114) aptly sums it up for me:

"From the outset of The Navidson Record, we are involved in a labyrinth, meandering from one celluloid cell to the next, trying to peek around the next edit in hopes of finding a solution, a centre, a sense of whole, only to discover another sequence, leading in a completely different direction, a continually devolving discourse, promising the possibility of discovery while all along dissolving into chaotic ambiguities too blurry to ever completely comprehend."

Erik Wallace

Hands down the most unusual and clever book I've ever read. Parts of it are totally overwhelming and other terrifying. I can't say enough about House of Leaves and recommend it to anyone who can deal with a book that doesn't follow a linear timeline. I'm very interested in reading other books by Danielewski.

This book was insane and took me six months on and off to read, but it was worth it. Truly a horror classic. Mark Z. Danielewski is bonkers and a genius for solely writing in such an avant-garde style. 

Jacque

marie

не знаю, з чого почати!! я думала, що вже переїла хоррорів, але "дім листя" виявився гурманською трапезою з трьох страв (Mark Danielewski served and I ate it up!!).
ненадійні оповідачі, ядро історії (документальний фільм), передане через треті руки і оплутане безумствами переповідачів, павутина з посилань на літературу справжню і вигадану (вигадані літературні джерела це так Сексі). там є гумор! і красиве, хоч подекуди і складне, письмо автора. а ще не уявляю, як це можна перекласти українською (але мушу зізнатись, що мені захотілось спробувати).
а ще це була перша книга, всесвіт/події якої мені снились.

Rohan Uddin

This is a crazy book. Its scary, wonderful, haunting, brilliant. I loved the structure, the academic criticisms and other fake books and footnotes. Nice touches. The horror part gets under your skin, which is as it should be. Some parts are difficult to read, and I skipped them. Maybe if I get a physical copy of the book I might read them again. The pace is fine, and the story and its metaphors are just great.

Idk I understand that it was attempting to push boundaries and break convention but it did it to such an extent that I was really frustrated for a lot of the time I was reading. I liked the story but it was so choppy and inconsistent that I would be excited about one part of it then that would end for four pages and i would get excited for the next part just for it to end. The last 40 pages or so of narrative were good and redeemed the book a bit in my mind. There were definitely VERY visceral moments which I enjoyed but it didn’t live up to my expectations.

Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves

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