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

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

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.

Cheryl Hedlund

i love ergodic literature because it is such a perfect use of its medium

Jordyn

I can’t believe it. After nearly a decade…she’s finished. What is there to say? 

Bowie 

Great payoff. Not gonna pretend I liked every page of this but it was worth it.

Leo Valentine

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."

Lena

i think anyone who calls themselves a reader must read this at least once in their life. this is literature as youve never seen before. transformative. an absolutely astonishing mind blowing book

Paige LeBook

Quite arduous to get through Zampano's initial narrative, but completely worth it.

Arguably one of my favorite "ghost" stories.

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-garden 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.

Midori Kobayashi

2 nope, not at fucking all by 5 stars


Have I finally read the greatest horror novel of this decade? yes. did i enjoy it eve one bit? no lol. did i feel spooky/creeped out/horror-y even once? i wish. i fucking wish...

i salute the author for the amount of work/energy this book would have taken to write, from footnotes to references to the weird formatting. but oh god apart from that pretentiousness, what is the story? fucking joke is what. i would try to describe but it's barely 3 lines and I'd rather not spoil even that for anyone. 

i am sorry, there is barely any plot to begin with and when something does begin to happen, we obviously have a 5-page monologue/rambling of a completely different timeline by the main character. how tf am i supposed to feel spooked by any of that??

Needless to say this was a fucking waste of time and money lmao. 


  Book Trigger Warnings: graphic violence, death and murder, violent animal death, suicide, sexual content, physical abuse, sexual assault and rape, mental illness, loss of a parent, institutionalization, foster care, infidelity, child abuse, incest, sexual abuse of children, body horror, drug abuse, overdose

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.

Alec Karlen

Kristen Claiborn

I find myself getting seriously excited when a one of my friends is excited about a book, so I read it. I don’t care what book, I will read it if somebody tells me they love it. The fiancé of a friend was SO excited to get this book, I absolutely had to look into it and found myself seriously intrigued. So I bought it. And then I read it. 
	Now, I read at least 200 books a year, and have been reading this much since I was about 15…so that means I have devoured well over 6000 books as an adult. If I could, I would read that many a year. Alas, there aren’t enough minutes in the day, so I’m limited. This book is, without a doubt, the most unique book I have ever laid my very lucky eyes upon. It’s enormous, so I was initially intimidated, and the pages aren’t always laid out like you’d expect a normal book to look like. As I started reading, I found myself interested in the story of this family and their new house. They were excited to be embarking on a new, if not completely domestic, adventure. But then the house, quite literally, goes bat-shit crazy. The outside looks like a normal, average, everyday house, but the inside is a big ol mess. Aside from the story of the family, there is the story of the guy telling the story of the guy who had tried to tell the story of the family. 
	Big. Ol. Mess. 
	It was a completely wild ride, from start to finish. The characters (people) aren’t even the most interesting part of the story, it was the house and the effects of both the house, and trying to tell the story of the house. It affected everything, including the lives of people who had had no contact with the house itself, just the words used to describe it. It was masterfully written (even if it is a bit of a waste of paper…but we’re book people so it’s an acceptable waste), keeping the reader both confused and enthralled. It will stay with you long after you finish…but thankfully I haven’t gone crazy…yet. At least more than I already am. I would give my left pinkie toe to see this made into a movie. 
	This book is sincerely not going to be loved by everyone, after reading the reviews I discovered a lot of people who genuinely loathed it. I, however, loved every page. I’ve become pretty darn stingy with my 5-star books in 2021, but this book was so good, so unique and involved, I wish I could give it six stars. Thank you Mr. Danielewski for spending the time, effort, and energy to craft such an amazing piece of literature.

Jenny 

I don’t know if I enjoyed or hated this book. When I tried to explain to someone what I was reading, I realized I liked the experience of the book more than the actual storyline. At times I found it immensely creative but certain elements dragged on to the point of feeling like a gimmick. I struggled with the last hundred pages as I just stopped caring and started rooting for the house. While I’m glad that I read the book, I definitely do not understand why anyone would pore over this as if there’s some profound meaning hidden in all the text. Much like the house, the book is whatever you bring to it.

Mykyta Barabanov

House of Leaves opens up as a complicated analyses of human self-obsession & it's implication on building a somehow healthy social interactions with the world around, especially with the loved ones. 

At the first glance HoL may seem as a rather ambiguous horror story about the haunting void dwelling from the basement of an ordinary house. However, the first impression is soon dissolved by it's intertwining storytelling technique, attention to which, I believe, is the key to unlock it's analyses of human complexity & the impact of inevitable physical & psychological traumas on the life itself. The book is full of secrets, encrypted messages & serves as a sorrow analyses of most the prominent human emotions. Ultimately, it's a love story, as dark as the one gets in the human world.

Stephan Happe

Alfredo santos

plain weird. maybe too much hype for this book, imho. Scholarly, mind twisting, yes. Really similar to David's foster wallace Infinite Jest, not really, except for a lot of rambling. Is it worth the read? I believe so, if you like new ways of prose, not simple books, with a touch of mysticism.

Maggie Gordon

So... House of Leaves. It's MASSIVELY popular in the horror community. If you look at best-of lists, it's usually at the top. Known for creative/bizarre formatting choices and extremely dense prose, I figured House of Leaves was probably something I'd either love or hate. Unfortunately, it's the latter. Well, perhaps hate is too strong a word. I don't hate the book; I'm rather indifferent to it. I appreciate what it was trying to do, but, for the most part, it wasn't particularly enjoyable or intriguing to me.

House of Leaves has a very unique construction. It's like a frame story in a frame story with some frames sticking out the sides and everything is in a footnote. The book has been put together by the narrator, Johnny, after he found the manuscript in a dead man's house. The manuscript was written by a man called Zampano who wrote what is essentially a dissertation on a documentary about a strange strange house. However, the documentary doesn't actually exist. The manuscript quotes a massive number of academic articles, many of which also don't exist. There are interviews with celebrities that never occurred. Johnny makes commentary throughout the entire book in the already voluminous footnotes, adding in his story. There's an appendix of letters from his mother that constitute a separate, but maybe related story. To add even more complications, the manuscript starts out fairly normal, but devolves into unique structures, some of which aren't even readable. Certain words are always in a particular colour, there are missing pieces to the work, and sometimes the work is shown in reverse and you need a mirror to understand what was said. Reading House of Leaves is an experience and one that you have to put effort into. 

Needless to say, there's a lot to work to be done to understand this book, and there are communities online dedicated to figuring out all of the strange codes and plots and mysteries within the novel. Normally I'd be quick to jump into this analysis, but I just didn't care about the story behind House of Leaves. It felt like more effort was put into making the work strange and hard to understand than making characters or a narrative that people could care about. Sure, the story is rather horrific, but did it engage me on its own merits? Not really...

The central thing that bugged me about House of Leaves was that it was a rather... masculine work, and if you look at the communities that have popped up around it, it seems to be mostly men that adore this novel. Not to suggest that a book that speaks more to men is a bad thing, but this particular book has an atmosphere that's more than a little hostile to women. It's not misogynistic claptrap in the least, but women are more likely to feel less welcome in its pages for subtle reasons. 

To start, Johnny's part of the story is really all about drugs and bitches. He's a fucked up character with fucked up friends, and I found him extraordinarily unpleasant to read about when all he talked about was who he screwed and what substances he ingested. Furthermore, women didn't really get to be characters in his segment of the plot. They were things to put on a pedestal or ogle which gets old pretty quickly. (Yes, Johnny's plot gets more nuanced, but the first parts are such a slough that by the time more interesting things were happening, I was already feeling distanced from his narrative.)

Women didn't fare all that well in the rest of the novel. There are a few female characters, but very few that were developed in any substantive manner. The ones that stand out are Pelafina and Karen Navidson. Pelafina is Johnny's mother who writes to him from a sanatorium after she tried to kill him when he was a small child. I found the Whalestoe Letters one of the most interesting aspects of the entire book, but they were quite short in comparison to everything else. Karen is a large part of the narrative as she's one of the main people featured in the documentary. Karen is an interesting character in that Zampano's narrative focused on her a lot, so there's a lot of discussion about her choices and actions. Unfortunately, even though both she and her husband have issues and problems, Karen's are framed as a little worse. There's a lot of focus on her infidelities and vanity, but less so on Navidson's narcissism (despite them being equally screwed up). The contrast between how the two characters were treated made me uncomfortable (which was aggravating, as the documentary story was the other part of this massive book that really engaged me, but I kept being drawn out of the narrative by how Karen was portrayed and treated). 

I dipped my toe into the fandom for this book, but withdrew it rather quickly. There was a lot of hostility to characters like Karen (one forum member went on very proudly about how he rewrote the book without her), and, honestly, it seemed like a lot of intense labour just to try and figure out what was really going on in a book that didn't capture my imagination that much anyway. I can spend hours reading meta for books that engage me, but House of Leaves never reached that level.

Overall, was House of Leaves a terrible novel? Nope, it just wasn't a book I enjoyed that much. There are gender issues, though I admit they are not nearly the worst in western literary canon. The narratives are confusing and unclear, leaving readers free to contemplate what everything really means and what really happened. Some might find this a wild journey, but I was not so enthused. I'm glad to have read the book as it is such a cultural icon in the genres that I read, but I'm glad I got it out of the library, and it will not be on my reread list.

Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves

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