Book Review: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
House of Leaves - A Reading Experience
What do you get when you combine an unreliable narrator, a house that’s bigger on the inside than the outside, and a book designed to make you feel lost inside its pages? You get House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski—a cult classic that’s as frustrating as it is fascinating. This is not a story you simply “read.” It’s an experience you tumble through, sometimes willingly, sometimes kicking and screaming, but always a little changed on the other side. Whether you end up hating it, obsessing over it, or both, one thing is certain: House of Leaves will not leave you indifferent.
Hype Report
House of Leaves is definitely a love it or hate it kind of journey. Goodreads readers average a 4.09stars. For me that equals Appropriately-Hyped.
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Aesthetic
The Cover
At first glance the cover of House of Leaves, designed by Eric Fuentiecilla, is deceptively simple. It appears as a block page with a compass rose at the center, title above, author below. The very top announces that this is “The Remastered Full-Color Edition”, the bottom “a novel.” Looking again, you notice a glossy black diagram that looks a little like a building diagram with a spiral staircase in the center. The spiral, a Fibonacci sequence, terminates at the center of the compass rose. Simple as it is, this design echoes the haunting content described in these pages. The cover more relevant after reading the book than before. The front flap of this edition is also shorter than the next page – a full color collage of seemingly disparate items – easter eggs if you care to know – and sets the tone for the stories within.
The spine is lined with polaroid style images of houses at different distances and angles, every other one black with the title, author, and publisher in the center. All instances of the word “house” on the cover and within the book are blue.
The back, short praise for the novel over an underexposed photo of a man in the dark.
In short – the cover experience is well -designed and appropriate for what lies within. Beautiful enough for proud display on a shelf. Mysterious enough to beg you to pick it back up.
Interior
The layout of the text in House of Leaves is an experience in itself. Its jarring layers of information force the reader to experience space in a wholly unexpected way. Attaching you to the character experience in a way that a straight typed story just can’t. The footnotes and endnotes read like a labyrinth. The bits of missing information tie you more fully to what is presented. The typography changes as the point of view changes, to include the notes. It’s a beautiful mess that gives so much dimension to the story. For instance, a sequence of pages decsribing a person moving through a passage that continues to shrink around them – so the type is presented in a square area that gets smaller from one page to the next, sucking you into the space by recreating it in two dimensions. A typographical and book design triumph. I’ve never read anything like it.
Did the design affect whether I bought the book?
I received House of Leaves as a gift from a family member, but they purchased the book because they had heard about the odd design and thought that I might enjoy it. They were right!
“I’ve come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angles of personality, the riddle of a soul.”
Summary
In Short
The house is bigger on the inside than the outside, so the inhabitants obsess over the anomally – other people do too.
From the Publisher
THE MIND-BENDING CULT CLASSIC ABOUT A HOUSE THAT’S LARGER ON THE INSIDE THAN ON THE OUTSIDE • A masterpiece of horror and an astonishingly immersive, maze-like reading experience that redefines the boundaries of a novel.
”Simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy, distressingly scary, breathtakingly intelligent—it renders most other fiction meaningless.” —Bret Easton Ellis, bestselling author of American Psycho
“This demonically brilliant book is impossible to ignore.” —Jonathan Lethem, award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
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 made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices, the story remains unchanged. Similarly, the cultural fascination with House of Leaves remains as fervent and as imaginative as ever. The novel has gone on to inspire doctorate-level courses and masters theses, cultural phenomena like the online urban legend of “the backrooms,” and incredible works of art in entirely unrealted mediums from music to video games.
Neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of the impossibility of their new home, 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.
Character Analysis
None of the characters in House of Leaves is fully likable. They all hold a mirror up to the ugly part of ourselves. On the other hand, we journey right along with them because we yearn to understand, to find meaning. Will and Karen do have full character arcs, and there is a degree of resolution to their story. The fact that the rest is left buzzing in the ether with so many unanswered questions is what makes this story enduring. Rereadable. Worthy of the hype.
“To fit the world or to make sense of it requires either reason or arms.”
Writing Style
The writing style in House of Leaves is utterly unique. It genuinely reads like a collection of pieces written by different people. Voice and tone cleanly shift depending on who is supposed to have written it. The book feels like shuffling through a box of someone’s notes and gathered materials. There are a great many references between povs that keep the reader hooked and performing mental gymnastics to try to understand the connections.
“In the future, readers of newspapers and magazines will probably view news pictures as more as illustrations than reportage, since they will be well aware that they can no longer distinguish between a genuine image and one that has been manipulated.”
Themes
Themes of fear, self-doubt, confronting trauma, mental illness, substance abuse, physical and sexual abuse, infidelity, obsession, art and literature’s symbiotic relationship with life, so much more. I actually don’t want to dive too deeply into the themes in this review, because there is just too much to discuss. Let’s dig into it in the comments!
“We are God’s echoes and God is Narcissus.”
Critical Evaluation
House of Leaves is so utterly and incomprehensibly different than anything I have ever read that I can’t critique it against similar works or draw comparisons to guide the way. Changing anything that I disliked about it would have altered the things I did like about it. It seems both heavy-handed and delicately balanced.
“An echo, while implying an enormity of a space, at the same time also defines it, limits it, and even temporarily inhabits it.”
Personal Opinion
This feels like following closely behind someone on their slow descent into madness while reading an academic study on the symptoms of their particular madness, so you can understand how they got there while trying to avoid the madness yourself.
House of Leaves is purposefully difficult to read. It is designed to create an experience in which you find yourself obsessed with the story, like our narrators Johnny Truant, Zampano, and Navidson. The prose sweeps broadly between mired-down academic droning, manic episodes of compulsive clarity, and complete disarray of interminable lists and word salad. The narrator tells you he is unreliable, which nearly makes him believable. As each piece of the story is revealed, it is both affirmed and debunked, leaving you in the dark – but ultimately left to sort through your own complicated emotions, responses, and beliefs.
“All solutions then are necessarily personal.”
Recommendation
Yes. Caveat: There are a lot of potential triggers in House of Leaves. Be advised, this is not a book for everyone. That said, if you have an interest in reading it, proceed with caution – you will leave the experience altered.
“People demand experts, though sometimes they are fortunate enough to find a beginner.”
Notes
House of Leaves is horror, but not the bloody kind. Psychological. Thrilling. Science fiction mixed with literary discourse. Questions of space and time, reality and unreality. The fear you bring is your own.
If you’ve read this. Tell me what you think! How you felt!
Buy This Book
May your life be as full as your bookshelf and as long as your TBR list.
Happy Reading!
