“We all create stories to protect ourselves.”
– Mark Z. Danielewski | House of Leaves
The majesty of a book that is “not a book” is an enchanting thing to encounter. For example, a choose your own adventure-style book takes a narrative form and plays with structure. You choose what to do in the story, which is a completely different approach to reading and experiencing a novel.
Other books go further.
Today on the blog, we are going to outline and read about Mark Z. Danielewski’s horror novel House of Leaves, as it fits within the realm of a book that is not quite a book; and, it fits within the meta-narrative of The Halloween Tree–a story within a story.
Summary
The book is a “found” novel by two fictitious authors named Zampano and Johnny Truant. Zampano, the author of the book itself, and Truant, who edits of the (somewhat) finished novel and comments on its authorship (footnotes for editing, translating, etc.).
Likewise, it’s also about a house that is “bigger on the inside” then it is on the outside. A family moves into the house and begins recording all the strange happenings inside the home. The film, and other relics, about this house becomes a documentary called The Navidson Record and it falls into the annals of critical examination as either being real or a hoax (most seem to lean toward it being a hoax).
As a result, Zampano’s book is an academic approach to the documentary film The Navidson Record. It is a literary attempt at examining the documentary itself while including historical context and its relationship to the world in which it was created. However, Zampano analyzes it from a horror perspective in his attempt to explain the oddness of the house. Truant’s descent into analyzing Zampano’s work results in him dismissing the writer’s claims and sources, but his own reliability is called into question.
It seems the House of Leaves is just as mysterious as the documentary reports.
Book blurb
From the Book:
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—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.
Critical response
Reviews on the back of the book are astounding:
”Simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy, distressingly scary, breathtakingly intelligent—it renders most other fiction meaningless.” —Bret Easton Ellis, bestselling author of American Psycho
“This demonically brilliant book is impossible to ignore.” —Jonathan Lethem, award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn
Additionally, Good Reads has it listed as a 4.09 our of 5 stars.
Five-star reviewers state that “House of Leaves is not an easy book to read” but that it is an important read nonetheless. Another reviewer stated that the book is “a postmodernistic satire on the subject of epistemology” as it connects sources and investigations into one book and calls into the question of reliability in sourcing.
Meanwhile, one-star reviews stated that the book made some readers “feel dumb, bored, and annoyed” and others found that “nothing seems to happen.” Additionally, others felt as though it was “so overdone” that it felt like a “dish served in a restaurant” thats should be “sent back.”
Impressions
I have heard of this book, but I do not own it. While I typically do Book Blurbs on books that I own, I heard of this book around the time I was finishing True Detective season one, as it seems to have quite a lot in common with weird fiction and The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers. These commonalities include the narrative choices themselves (what information you get to find out where an when) and the overall eeriness of the story–we never get to know everything about the story.
I think this would be an interesting book of you are even remotely interested because it is a multilayered story that asks readers to go beyond the regular idea of a narrative and engage with the content more critically, perhaps even by close reading each page.
For example, I own a book–a sort of manipulative biography–about Stephen King that features inserts of faux-posters and edited pages from real books. It is a excellent way to experience the history of an author and their contributions to literature.
Regardless, if you have ever read this book, please share your experience in the comments! I would love to hear about it.
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