House of Leaves

This has to be one of my favorite books ever read.

I got my first copy of House of Leaves when I was just graduating high school and going into college from my neighbor who had said she had to read it for her psychology class. This is not a regular textbook, though. Going through it was a journey, the page count is on the longer side, the genre was different than what I was into at the time, the story is mind-fucking, and the layout is jacked up. It took me almost the whole summer to get through it, but it was so worth it.

There is a reason why she had to read it for her class: I do not know if ya’ll had read this and had the same experience, but this was the first book that really messed with my thinking. I got so sucked into it that, especially in the last 2/3s, I was wondering almost half the time if this was legit, or fake. House of Leaves begins with a guy named Johnny Truant who finds a large file still being worked on in a dead man’s home; from there we dive into the record headfirst, reading through “the Navidson Record” while still having Johnny check in every now and then to show us his decline in sanity. “The Navidson Record” follows a family who buys a house on Ash Tree Lane where after awhile the house becomes very different from what they thought. It gets to a point where clearly the house is larger on the inside than the outside.

In the highest Mark Z Danielewski fashion and as I said before, the layout is jacked up. This probably contributed to how I got so sucked into it. House of Leaves starts out with a normal layout with a simple body of text, then there are footnotes by Johnny added in which start as little tidbits which then become paragraphs. Pretty quickly, you have to stop and reassess the situation and change how you read because you have sidebars, the regular body of text, footnotes, and what have you all on one page. As a tip, I would take it section by section and read the different layouts separate so I would not miss anything. The best is when eventually all laws of layout are abandoned and the random squares in the middle of the pages come. No sarcasm there.

I upgraded to a hardcover when I found one for real cheap at a school sale a couple of years ago and I have it in the back of my mind to read it again so that I can figure all that shit out. Note that in terms of Danielewski’s books, House of Leaves is going to be the tippity top of the non-normal book, and apparently that either intimidates people, or frustrates them to abandoning it. I get it. House of Leaves was my first Danielewski book, so to read that then read his other works was like coming down a slide from insanity to normalcy. He has a way of sucking people into the worlds he creates, and I need that. I find it hard with books sometimes to get sucked into the world authors create.

If you would like a horrific mind challenge, I would recommend House of Leaves every time. This is definitely a discussion book; I do not remember if I had brought it up, but Danielewski has a book club going with his books through his Facebook page, so that will be a good place to start if you want to discuss this maze. Otherwise, you can find your copy here.

10/10