Book Log 2022 #10: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

I first heard about this book on an episode of So Many Damn Books, where they discussed this on its 20th anniversary of publication. I don't read a lot of horror, but was intrigued by how they introduced the book, so I did something I rarely do: I stopped the pod before they got to anything like spoilers so I could read the book.

I'm glad I did that, though the book is so unusual that I don't know how much of it would have actually been spoiled if I'd listened all the way through before reading. In any case, It's also a hard book to describe without getting into too much detail, so fair warning if you read ahead!

The book is purported to be based on a manuscript found by a Los Angeles-based tattoo apprentice named Johnny Truant, who discovered it among the belongings of a blind man in his neighborhood who recently died. The manuscript appears to have started as an academic paper on a documentary called The Navidson Record, which captured the story of a family in Virginia that moved into a house that would spontaneously change. Doors would appear where they hadn't been previously, and new rooms and hallways would appear whose dimensions were beyond what should fit in the house.

The manuscript claims that the documentary became a sensation and spawned a wealth of supporting discussion and scholarship, except that Truant finds through his own research that there was no film with this name, and that the family doesn't exist (though they appear to be based on real people). But even these discoveries are questionable, as it becomes clear that Truant's mental state is slipping, through the writing he adds as he continues to organize the manuscript.

The unusual structure of the novel - multiple unreliable narrators, mixed points of view, footnotes that have their own footnotes, etc. - is complemented by it's unique visual style. The text is often laid out in a style other than reading left to right, with some pages containing fewer words or words arranged in a way to reflect the events or emotion of the story. Some words and phrases are printed in different colors (for example, in the edition I read, the word house is always printed in blue: house). All of this ramps up the creepiness factor, and also adds to the unease created by both the story of the house and the burgeoning madness of the narrator. Apparently the author typeset the novel himself to ensure that it would printed as he intended.

I didn't really feel like this was a horror novel, but I don't think there's really a genre that it would neatly fit within. I've also seen it described as a thriller, a love story, and a send-up of academic writing, all of which apply at points. 

While I don't think I really "got" the novel fully, I do see why a book podcast would return to it 20 years after publication. There's enough here left open to interpretation that you can return to the book regularly and take something new out of it. It's also the sort of singular work that's worth revisiting to see what impact it's had on other books.