House of Leaves

This Christmas I bought a certain book for my sister so that I could read it, making it a double-edged present. Let there be no moral outcry, this is a perfectly acceptable thing to do if the present is a book. I suggest you make a list of books you want and add a column of birthdays or other occasions of the people living in your house, then start drawing lines between the two lists, because this is a flawlessly devious tactic and everybody wins if the books you buy are good.


House of leaves is an experimental(sic) novel, the debut of Mark Z. Danielewski. I'm told it took him somewhere in the region of ten years to complete. In layman's terms, it is an edited, pieced-together fictional and seemingly definitive analysis of a fictional documentary concerning a couple with two children who move into a house and discover a series of incrementally impossible spacial anomalies. The book is labeled many things, first and foremost a horror story. Personally I can't pin it down to any conventional genre; if I had to call it something, I would say it's a Progressive novel. My sister certainly considers it to be Horror - she will not sleep in the same room as it, and her mantra of eating muesli in yoghurt whenever she reads horror books has not suppressed House of Leaves. Currently she has stopped reading it until an undetermined later date, and I have started.

From the beginning, I was gripped by it in a very different way than any other book I've read. The best way I can describe it is that it has a very submersive mechanic. Hours will slip by while this book holds you. To give you a brief idea, here are some shots. The first page:

As things progress, the prose becomes more and more bizarre. Coupled with the multiple nature of the narrative, the experience fast becomes similar to watching several different films on several television sets. Merely reading the book feels like treading a labyrinth.

This is a little way into it. The footnotes send you to read different sections of the pages constantly, and there are often footnotes within footnotes. Finally, here's an idea of the territory I'm currently in:

              I needed a mirror to read about half of the text on the above page.

                                    (I'm less than a third of the way in.)

So, if you need an excuse to get out of the house, head down to your local bookstore and demand an explanation for why they don't have this book.

Down in the undertow