Book: House of Leaves

My "airplane reading" and hotel reading on the trip out was Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, something Liz and I picked up the other day on the "highly recommended" endcap at Barnes & Noble. This book is difficult to describe, at best. The story revolves around a Nobel-winning photographer, Will Navidson, and his family as they move into a new house in Virginia. They soon discover that their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. And it seems to be growing. And a new doorway sprouts in one of their rooms, with a hallway inside of indeterminate (and changing) length. This new labyrinth seems harmless at first, but takes a sinister turn when something inside it starts to growl.

House of Leaves is a horror novel, but it's a post-modern work that utilizes tools created by authors like Nabokov and Borges, while firmly placing itself as a great piece of literature in its own right. The story is "told" through the book House of Leaves, notes on the documentary film that Navidson shot about his house. Another story is told through the footnotes by the compiler and editor, an unstable young man rendered even moreso by reading about the house. There are resounding echoes of Pale Fire and Charles Kinbote here, but House of Leaves is much more. Every technique Danielewski utilizes has some meaning or bearing on the tale: the physical cover of the book is smaller than the pages inside, mirroring the house; footnotes lead to other footnotes lead to the appendix lead back to footnotes, at one point miring the reader in a twisting labyrinth much like the characters in the novel; photographs mix with letters and poems, shopping lists, and scholarly notes; sources both real and made-up are cited in the same breath. The singer Poe (sister of the author) even created her album, Haunted, to mirror the events in the book.

But on the other hand, House of Leaves is a classic horror story, where unexplained (and thankfully, never explained) events turn something ordinary into something twisted, sinister, and ultimately dangerous. The characters explore this at length, and turn to Heidegger, who discussed the idea of "being in the world" which causes existential dread; although the characters note that Heidegger used the term "sein nicht-zu-Hause," literally meaning "being not-at-home," implying that dread comes from being outside of a comforting area, like a house. One of the key elements of any horror story is the perversion of the "safe" into the unsafe, and that is exactly where Danielewski succeeds: his characters never realize just how dangerous the house is until it's much too late.

House of Leaves is the kind of book you'll love or hate. It's got more than a little Nabokov and Borges knitted into it, so if you like either of those writers, Leaves is probably a good bet. My suggestion: when the book refers to the appendixes or footnotes, follow it. Get lost. It makes for a much more disturbing reading experience.