House of Leaves

Another book that I'd been searching for (and found at the library) was House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. I'd seen it mentioned somewhere, and I thought it would be exactly the kind of book I'd like.

I read through it a couple of nights ago, and all I can say is

Wow.

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Wow.

Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Wow. Wow.

Wow.

Wow. Wow.

Wow.

Wow.¹

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¹You want a synopsis? Try this: it concerns a documentary film called The Navidson Record², a video archive of a series of bizarre events occurring within a suburban house. By bizarre, I mean that a new hallway appears where no such hallway could possibly exist (where, logically, a doorway would lead outside of the house). Even spookier, the new hallway is dark grey, featureless, and nightmarishly labyrinthine. Seriously, people get lost inside the house for days on end.

²I should also point out that said documentary may not even exist. The only reference to this film is contained within an essay written by a blind man³, and which was discovered by our narrator (Johnny) who found it in the man's apartment after he died. Johnny has presented the essay as he has found it, but, incidentally, there's
good reason to suspect he's not telling the true story.

³The essay also included plenty of visual artifactsº, such as photographs, sketches and supplementary materials. These are shown in the Appendices, however, a lot of the said items Do Not Exist. A lot of the interviews included never actually happened. A lot of the references included in the footnotes refer to nonexistent publications. In fact, a lot of the story Does Not Exist either, for reasons which become all too - no, wait, you can never really understand what's going on.ⁿ

ºI haven't even covered the interesting typographical layout yet. The book abounds with plenty of footnotes and cross-references (and plenty of ramblings from our friendly narrator Johnny, who incidentally has some interesting tales of his own). Soon, the footnotes themselves threaten to overwhelm the main copy itself, and the layouts change dramatically over the course of the book. And then, once the characters start to investigate this dark hallway, the very fabric of the book changes -

ⁿThe way I feel after reading this book is the same way I felt after I watched this. Nonetheless, I liked House of Leaves very muchly.