House Of Leaves

a novel by Mark Danielewski

This blog thing is going to take a little getting used to. This is my fourth edit of this post. restart:

It's a good thing i ran out of ambien before i started reading this book. It kept me awake at night with purpose, it caught me in it's web, i felt like i'd been had. the joke wasn't on me, it was in me.

From the first page of disparaging self reflexive warnings to avoid the bulk story within the House Of Leaves, a wider story emerges. The "observer" becomes a servant, an enabler to an egotistic exhibition of the mind. Subsequently, the reader creates her own subtext as the stories press on. But from the very beginning, the book asks the reader to step away. "this is not for you." It's not the first time I've been asked to shy away from a story by the very author who penned it. It's literary postmodernism at it's most basic, but necessary. Whatever the observer chooses, the observer finds. In the matter of a House Of Leaves, what incentive, after all, does anyone have to stay? Multiple footnotes, nondescript editing, hell it's not even a true story.

Will Navidson moves his family to a House in the VA countryside. Within days he discovers that the new home he's found for his family is larger on the inside...than on the outside. As the psychodrama unveils an emptiness and confusion in Navidson's life as well as that of an editor (the details of which are footnoted throughout the book) the House becomes an infinite labyrinth of dark possibility, while the outside structure remains the exact same. Navidson documents the phenomena, shreds of which comprise the maze of Danielewski's (ficticious) novel - all of this layered between the editor's trystic tales of sex, drugs, and most notably, emotional voids.

It's 700 pages of kinetic nihilism, a palimpsest of interdimensional nightmares & realities. The spell of both the novel and the the power that Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves exercises over an observer's imagination is eerily related to the novel's pivotal issue: the impossible appearance of a cold, black hallway in the wall of Will Navidson's family home. As mentioned above, this spatial anomaly is immeasurably increased by the oddity of it's placement: the family's living room. With careful linguistic science (or just damn good writing), the light in the family room becomes the only balance for the dark and ever growing cavernous hallway, within which lies more dark, more cold and the most unknown.

The hallway is "Unlike The Twilight Zone, however, or some other like cousin where understanding comes neat and fast (i.e. This is clearly a door to another dimension! or This is a passage to another world—with directions!) the hallway offers no answers."

The darkness coming upon the Navidson family, enveloping their home solely within it's walls - riddles the family with primal fear and scandalous revelations. Navidson's wife forbids him to explore the hallway, but flirts with the men he invites over to look on his behalf. House of Leaves is a written account of the vast expanse of spatial fear we maintain in our nightmares and bring forth into reality. Navidson's issues are mirrored by editorial footnotes - Johnny Truant falls ass backwards into a manuscript describing the eerie Navidson story. As he reads about the void, both metaphysical and real, Truant relays his own story of sexuality guided by emotional malaise and drug fueled ecstasy. Truant's void.

it's a lot of words to descirbe a small 700 page book. At it's crux, House Of Leaves attacks the observer with an unrelentless living ego consisting of multiple forces & personlities, and each ego within the layers of text discovers a new void within themselves. Darkness is an absence of light. The path by which it is explored evokes the fear & revelation that perhaps there's more than just "something missing" in our lives, community, minds, neighborhoods, families - if we exist in the spaces between, the void becomes material. for how long can a mental crevasse continue, how deep will it go... What choices will we make

in the cavernous hallway of my own mind, i am forever lost

Also Notable: Danielewski's sister founded the band Poe and wrote an album, as well as multiple other tracks on other records, purely about House Of Leaves. Check it out here.