House of Leaves

Read from Saturday, January 14th to Sunday, February 5th.

What a crazy trip House of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski, was.  When I first read the intro to this book, about a guy reading the same book and having nightmares, I fell asleep on my couch and had a nightmare myself.  It was crazy.  I was almost too freaked out to continue at that point, but I am glad that I stuck with it.  HOL is tough to explain.  It is a work of art, first of all.  An experiential book, one that would not work in any other format than the large, full-color, physical book.  There are pictures, diagrams, single words on pages, sentences on different parts of the page, going every direction, boxes of footnotes within pages, and words on top of other words. 

HOL is the story of a man, Johnny Truant, who finds a collection of writing by another recently deceased man, Zampano, who was writing about "The Navidson Record," a supposedly famous home movie about a man, Will Navidson, who explores his mysterious house.  So there are stories within stories within stories, told from many different narrators.  The bulk of HOL is Zampano doing an academic study of The Navidson Record, filled with all kinds of (fictitious) academic sources.  Johnny is organizing Zampano's work, but he comments frequently in a different font of footnotes.

Will Navidson is a famous photojournalist who buys a house in Virginia with his wife, Karen, and two children.  He sets out to record the family at all times with Hi-8s in order to capture intimate family moments.  Him and Karen have had difficulties because he was always out in harm's way, but now Will is trying to become a family man.  However they soon discover strange things about the house.  The inside seems to be growing larger than the outside.  Will, his brother and others cannot seem to figure out the anomaly.  Soon, a hallway appears in the house, and Will explores, using his cameras of course.  Inside, there is a never-ending maze of hallways, all pitch black and with no other discernible features, and much, much larger than the house should be.  Navidson, his brother and friends, and even some professional explorers, try to explore this fascinating, but freaky find.  The hallways always seem to shift, and although there is no sign of life, there is always a persistent growl heard from afar. 

One of the explorers goes crazy and shoots the other two.  After a shaky rescue mission, Will's brother dies as well, and Karen issues an ultimatum that they must evacuate.  They spent months apart, both from the house and themselves, and the marriage seems to be on the rocks.  But Will has to return to the House.  He cannot leave without seeing it through to the end, so he goes on an epic exploration that lasts for weeks.  Karen senses him in danger and follows him to the house, and Will is saved at the last moment by waking up on the lawn.  It is not a horror story, but in fact a love story.  They need each other, and once they realize that fact, they can go back to their own lives and are released from the house. 

Johnny, meanwhile, while trying to comprehend all that Zampano wrote, slowly sinks into a mentally deranged psychopath.  He hears and sees a monster following him at all times.  He cannot sleep.  He goes out with his friend Lude and picks up a lot of girls, but always falls back into a constant despair.  He leaves L.A. to try and find the house for himself, but he wanders around the country aimlessly, barely surviving.  Eventually, Johnny kills a guy, however he is a very unreliable narrator so it is difficult to piece together exactly what happened.  At the end of the novel, we are presented with a series of letters from his mother, who was extremely paranoid and crazy in a mental institute.  She misses her son terribly, and eventually kills herself.

This was a very interesting but great reading experience.  I was very exhausted after finishing the book.  It was very cool to constantly be shifting the book around to follow the story.  The set-up follows the mood in the story.  When the characters are cramped, the writing is cramped.  When they are lost and don't know which direction to go, the words go every which way.  It is a cool effect.  Definitely recommend checking this book out.  Four out of five stars.