House of Leaves

Yes, this is what some of the pages look like.  By the time you get there, it makes sense.  Kind of.

Last week I devoured House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I finished it on Friday and was sad that it was over. Given the nature of the book, and how difficult some of the reading is, getting through it in a week means there was a lot of time just sitting reading (or code breaking, or what have you.) My continued reaction was, "How did this book come out 13 years ago and I never knew it existed until now?"

Then I started suspecting that it hadn't come out 13 years ago, that the copyright date was a lie, and that the fact that it was set in the 90's was just another clue to the true nature of the house. Then I looked it up online and figured that was wrong, but I couldn't shake the niggling doubt that everything on the internet was a vast conspiracy to convince me that the book hadn't just come out this year.

House of Leaves is the story of a slacker named Johnny Truant (maybe his real name, probably not) who finds a manuscript written by an old, blind guy named Zampano (who was a character in La Strada). The manuscript is a scholarly treatise about a movie called The Navidson Record which Zampano couldn't have seen (since he's blind) which is a found footage (although we're told the footage was taken and edited by Navidson, so it's not so much found as a more traditional documentary with lots of found footage within it) about a family who moves into a house that turns out to be... a gateway to somewhere else, with a minotaur.

Navidson is a Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist and he's got a grant to record and follow his family as they move into and get settled in a new house in Virginia. His wife, Karen Green is a former supermodel, and they have two kids, Daisy and Chad. The first thing Navidson (or Navy, as in blue) notices is that the dimensions of the house don't match up. It's 1/4-inch bigger on the inside than on the outside. They go to visit relatives and come back to find a new hallway in their living room. It is ash gray, and featureless, and goes about ten feet in a direction that's impossible, because it's on an outside wall, and you can clearly see that there's not ten feet of house there from the outside.

Thus begins an exploration of a giant maze of featureless, lightless hallways that lead to a giant room with a giant stairway in the middle leading down. Navidson first contacts an engineering professor at the local university to help him measure his house, and eventually gets explorers (guys who climb Everest and such) to mount an expedition into the house and find whatever is inside.

Oh, and Johnny Truant goes through his own journey as he reads the manuscript, edits it to both restore parts that Zampano has tried to delete, and tells us about his own life. It's possible that Zampano never existed, and the whole thing is written by Johnny, or possibly Johnny doesn't exist and the whole thing is written by his mother, Pelafina (although if he doesn't exist, then she's not really his mother, is she?) All this is found in footnotes, appendices, and exhibits which take you on a merry chase through the book itself.

So there are layers within layers here. Oh, and the author's sister is a pop star named Poe who put out an album called Haunted, which includes tracks related to the book. In fact, in the first, hardcover edition (which is actually the Second Edition because the First Edition was distributed via the internet) there are characters on the endpapers which, when combined, put into a hex editor, and turned into an AIFF file plays a 2 second clip from one of the tracks on her album.

Yes, it's that kind of book.

What was amazing to me was that we see here a description of a found-footage movie in 2000, the year after Blair Witch came out, but before the spate of them started. Even so, the work that went into this book means it must have been started before Blair Witch, so he's describing a cinematic genre which doesn't really exist yet. If anything, House of Leaves reminds me more of Lake Mungo than, say the Paranormal Activitiy movies.

For some reason (which Danielewski will only say is "cinematic") every time the word house appears in the book, it is in blue print.

I can't recommend this book highly enough. I wished I was reading it concurrently with someone, because I wanted to talk about it as I went through it. It really is quite a journey.