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House of Leaves
by: Mark Z. Danielewski

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375703768
ISBN: 0375703764
Label: Pantheon
Manufacturer: Pantheon
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 709
Publication Date: March 07, 2000
Publisher: Pantheon
Release Date: March 07, 2000
Sales Rank: 515
Studio: Pantheon

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.

Now, for the first time, this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and newly added second and third appendices.

The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

Amazon.com:
Had The Blair Witch Project been a book instead of a film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors of Blast at their most avant-garde, the result might have been something like House of Leaves. Mark Z. Danielewski's first novel has a lot going on: notably the discovery of a pseudoacademic monograph called The Navidson Record, written by a blind man named Zampanò, about a nonexistent documentary film--which itself is about a photojournalist who finds a house that has supernatural, surreal qualities. (The inner dimensions, for example, are measurably larger than the outer ones.) In addition to this Russian-doll layering of narrators, Danielewski packs in poems, scientific lists, collages, Polaroids, appendices of fake correspondence and 'various quotes,' single lines of prose placed any which way on the page, crossed-out passages, and so on.

Now that we've reached the post-postmodern era, presumably there's nobody left who needs liberating from the strictures of conventional fiction. So apart from its narrative high jinks, what does House of Leaves have to offer? According to Johnny Truant, the tattoo-shop apprentice who discovers Zampanò's work, once you read The Navidson Record,

For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how.

We'll have to take his word for it, however. As it's presented here, the description of the spooky film isn't continuous enough to have much scare power. Instead, we're pulled back into Johnny Truant's world through his footnotes, which he uses to discharge everything in his head, including the discovery of the manuscript, his encounters with people who knew Zampanò, and his own battles with drugs, sex, ennui, and a vague evil force. If The Navidson Record is a mad professor lecturing on the supernatural with rational-seeming conviction, Truant's footnotes are the manic student in the back of the auditorium, wigged out and furiously scribbling whoa-dude notes about life.

Despite his flaws, Truant is an appealingly earnest amateur editor--finding translators, tracking down sources, pointing out incongruities. Danielewski takes an academic's--or ex-academic's--glee in footnotes (the similarity to David Foster Wallace is almost too obvious to mention), as well as other bogus ivory-tower trappings such as interviews with celebrity scholars like Camille Paglia and Harold Bloom. And he stuffs highbrow and pop-culture references (and parodies) into the novel with the enthusiasm of an anarchist filling a pipe bomb with bits of junk metal. House of Leaves may not be the prettiest or most coherent collection, but if you're trying to blow stuff up, who cares? --John Ponyicsanyi

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Dull, boring, and who cares??
I really wanted to like this book. All the post-modern literary devices appeal to me, and I was looking forward to the creative typesetting, the story of Johnny Truant told in footnotes, all of it. I am the kind of reader who often finds myself up til the wee hours when I get engrossed in a book. I thought House of Leaves had the potential to be one of those books.

But as it turned out, all this book ever did was put me to sleep. Part of the problem was that the literary devices in this case really got in the way of the story. Being diverted from the narrative of the "main" story by a three-page footnote is disruptive to say the least. And when it happens every chapter, it just starts to get annoying. But the bigger problem for me was that I fundamentally didn't care about any of these characters. Johnny Truant was a compulsive liar with a crush on a stripper. Whoo-hoo. Zampano was hard for ... Read More

Rating:

- Stephen King meets Kenneth Patchen
In brief: this book's structure is totally derivative of Kenneth Patchen's "Sleepers Awake" and "Journal of Albion Moonlight." It is as compelling as Stephen King in the sense that it is a satisfactory horror novel and there is a bit more depth to it than what one would expect from the genre. What annoyed me the most about the book wasn't the actual story or storytelling, but the length and the fact that a lot of people seemed to think that his surrealist construction of the book was in some way original.

Rating:

- Okay but overly long
I picked this up without hearing any reviews of it. It was interesting but I quickly realized that Johnny was not an interesting character. I did like the story about the house, but it was layered in so much other fluff that you definitely lost the continuity of horror that should have been there.

By the end I was exhausted and sick of the story. The pacing felt sonorous and I was skipping or skimming huge chunks just to get to the next section.

The post-modern stuff worked in some places, but I had a hard time seeing what the significance of its use was in several places. Done properly it should have contributed to the sense of disjointedness and horror, but it was so prevalent in the text that it lost much of its umph.

Still I'd recommend it if you're looking for some interesting reading.

Rating:

- House of Leaves
House of Leaves is, arguably, Danielewski's greatest and most defining work to date. It is hard to sum up what HoL (as it is known to many fans) is, but it is most definitely not the typical book.

The premise of Danielewski's work is that a young man, Johnny Truant, finds an unpublished manuscript analyzing a film, that does not exist, about a house which exhibits preternatural phenomena. But that is about where the concrete facts of the work end, and even those facts are up for debate. Danielewski structured his work, and characters, in such a way that readers now theorize that Johnny was a child from the nonexistent film, that Johnny's mother was actually the man whom he recovered the manuscript from, that the house was actually a being that made the story up, and a whole host of other ideas that will not make sense until you read the work.

Though this work is unconventional and very ... Read More

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