Mark Danielewski: House Of Leaves
Gary Marshall
House Of Leaves is one of the strangest books we’ve seen for some time. With multiple narrators, a mass of footnotes and direct transcripts of video tapes, the novel has been described as a "literary Blair Witch Project’ – a description we’d wholeheartedly agree with.
The novel is narrated by Johnny Truant, a bar-hopping low-life who is losing his grip on reality. When an old man – Zampano – dies, Truant grabs a manuscript from his apartment and takes it home to read it. This manuscript is an analysis of The Navidson Record, a collection of videotapes that record some spooky goings on in a suburban house. As Truant reads the manuscript, he reproduces it in full, sharing his observations with us and describing his own increasingly fragile mental state.
There are three main stories in House Of Leaves: Truant’s reactions to the manuscript, Zampano’s analysis of The Navidson Record, and the contents of the videotapes themselves. As the novel continues, each story overlaps. Zampano adds extensive footnotes to his work and attempts to contact the famous people (Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Camille Paglia) mentioned in the tapes; Truant attempts to explain the more tortuous footnotes, adding explanations and analysis of his own, and unnamed "editors" in turn comment on both Zampano’s and Truant’s comments. The Navidson Record would have made an excellent spine-chiller in its own right, but the analysis and footnotes rack the creepiness up by a notch. In the early stages of the transcripts, we know that something scary’s going to happen: the footnotes tell us so.
As if the layers of comment weren’t complicated enough, after a few dozen pages things go completely mental. The word house is printed throughout in blue, without explanation; footnotes become longer than the sections they’re commenting on, print is 
or 
, entire sections are crossed out; some pages contain a single word or letter, while others are filled with lists of buildings or household amenities. All of these things are reproduced faithfully, resulting in pages where the only text is "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX", other pages with letters and words missing due to "fire damage" (the gaps are replaced by spaces and square brackets), still others with text at crazy angles or tiny font sizes. If you attempt to read this book in the bath, you’ll probably drown.
The book’s ambition is also its downfall. The crazy typography and constant interjections from Truant (and others) make it difficult to follow parts of the story and, in the early sections especially, you’ll be sorely tempted to throw the book out of the window. Many of the tangents – psychological theories, local history, analysis of photographs, lists of camera equipment – overstay their welcome, and the ending is curiously flat, as if the writer suddenly ran out of ideas. Some scenes jar with the rest of the book; in particular, Truant’s description of his trip to a bar, where he talks to a band and discovers they’ve read the book he’s still writing. This is either an unintentional error or – even worse – a ham-fisted "it was all a dream" scenario lifted straight from an episode of Dallas.
House Of Leaves is a brave attempt to do something different, updating Burroughs’ cut-up technique for a new generation of readers. At over 700 pages, however, the novel would have benefited from some judicious editing, and the overall impression is one of a writer too enamoured with typographical tricks. Nonetheless, House Of Leaves is an original and unique novel; for all its faults, it’s unlike anything else you’ll read this year.
I enjoyed reading this,However I have not read the book yet this analysis was interesting.
johnny finding people who read his editing on the internet isn’t an error. that journal entry is dated a year after the other ones. it can be assumed that he published it or put it on the internet between 1998 and 1999 as the first edition, because all books that can be bought are the “second edition”
I have tried various times to finish this book, but it has succeeded in unsettling my mind. I cannot read it on my own as it serves to compliment my own paranoia of the unexplained and creepy. Yet it must be done.
This is a good book for those who like enigmas and horror.
What the author of this review doesn’t mention is that Danielewskwi had the first 3/4s of the book as a manuscript for some years, handing around to his friends and uploading bits and pieces of it on the internet. This is the “first edition.” The part where Johny is in the bar listening to the band was written for the second edition, set after the first edition had had time to filter around the internet, gaining cult fame as things do.
Shortly after I read it, I took a class on classical mythology, and noting that the book had many references to greek myth, decided to ask the professor about the specifics of one in particular. As soon as I mentioned the name of the book, she said she had tried to read it before, but had to stop due to it “being so difficult to get through.” This was a mythology professor with a masters in archaeology. Yes, it can be rather tedious to wade through the immense footnotes and make sense of the crazy fonts and burned out passages, but I disagree with the author of the review in that this is a bad thing. It brings out the level of obsession that johnny has with the manuscript that no amount of normal writing could get across.
If you’re knowledgeable about mythology, religion, and literature you’ll get a lot out of the imagery and wordplay used in the book. It’s almost a satire of literary review and English majors should enjoy it thoroughly. Yes, it’s complicated to read – but if you can settle into the neuroticism you may find yourself being absorbed by the book. It’s meant to be difficult to read, meant to be agoraphobic and claustrophobic, and the ending will mean a lot more to you if you find yourself sucked into the pages.
it started out creepy and disturbing, it was a great premise, spooky, but it just never went anywhere, i became bored about three quarters of the way in. it was just empty and barren and there was nothing going on. i read a lot of this sort of book. Gravity’s Rainbow, 2666, Garp, Sotweed, Infinite Jest, I’m not sure why, I think I like something I can get lost in for a while. But I like a plot that builds up to a bang up ending that makes the long slog worthwhile. and this just didn’t do it for me.