House of Leaves

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Horror / Danielewski, Mark Z.	4-week checkout	On Hold Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Danielewski, Mark	4-week checkout	Due 04-24-2024

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

And you thought "Lost" was complicated... submitted by lenadams on July 29, 2008, 9:44pm A lot has been written about this debut novel, a lot of which has been better than what I could write. It seems about as many people adore the book as dismiss it out of hand. Nevertheless, I needed to remedy the lack of a review here because if you're a certain kind of reader, you MUST read this book.

Esquire magazine summed up the work thus:

"Gist: It's fallen to a club kid named Johnny Truant to organize the manuscript left behind by a dead blind man who called himself Zampano. Zampano's papers are commentary on a documentary film about a spooky house and the secrets it contains. Said house has a "vortex" or something along those lines--it's bigger inside than it is outside. The documentary goes wrong in a "Blair Witch Project" (sorry -- the comparison is inevitable) kind of way, and Truant, upon getting more involved with Zampano's narrative, goes ape-shit crazy.

"Upshot: House of Leaves is a novel that looks more daunting than it actually is. For all its po-mo tricks (faux-academic commentary, footnotes, an index, poems, collages, photos), it is, at its center, a rather basic, and insightful, character study."

I bought my first copy the week it came out almost nine years ago, unaware of what I was getting into but intrigued by the cover, the heft and the odd typography. Little did I know what a rabbit hole I was about to fall down.

This is a story about how things are seldom what they appear to be. Old man, young man, happy couple, sad couple, nice house, anonymous apartment...nothing can be taken for granted. And when the deeply convoluted narrative and deeply disturbed and disturbing characters finally collide in horror, the horrible really is there, waiting for them all.

Fair warning: if self-referentialism drives you batty, do not read this book. And if authorial games and riddles seem cheap and unfair to you (rather than witty and breathtakingly clever), skip ahead to something else (The Bourne Ennui, perhaps?)

Enough people have found the book's density and oddnesses daunting enough that there's an "Idiot's Guide to House of Leaves" on the web (http://markzdanielewski.info/features/guide/index.html) that helps you organize your thinking, even if it doesn't really answer anything.

It's going on a decade now since I read House of Leaves, and I still think of it. A lot. I'm guessing you will as well.

Haunting submitted by kelmu on July 22, 2018, 6:00pm House of Leaves is, in my opinion, a book where you get more out of it the more you put into it. Alone, the book is a good read. If you're willing and able to dig in to the additional material, such as the letters that go along with it, the music made for it, or the online discussions, it gets more interesting.

A worthwhile read if you're ok with things being a little creepy.

The Best Book submitted by Annarborkaren on July 13, 2019, 10:48am This is quite possibly the scariest book ever made. 10/10 would reccomended.

Okay, But Definitely Doesn't Deserve the Hype submitted by Meginator on August 1, 2022, 3:29pm Content Note: This book includes some violence, including one scene with violence against an animal.

I simply don’t get the massive ongoing hype around this book, and I definitely did not find it to be particularly frightening. Built around several layers of simultaneous storytelling, the narrative structure mercifully does seem to have an actual purpose (unlike so many postmodern novels), but the various threads are not equally interesting and I often found myself rushing toward the end of the decreasingly sensible present-day story to get back to the actual horror novel. The latter storyline, a haunted house tale that is itself wrapped in an adequately executed pastiche of the academic treatise, is the best part of this book; one of the copious intertwining footnotes refers to a novelization of these events, and honestly I would have much rather read that than this bloated, blathering attempt at self-winking, pretentious nonsense.

Nonetheless, some of the literary invention does actually work well. The unconventional page layouts mirror and illustrate aspects of the aforementioned house in a way that draws the reader into the story; unfortunately, Danielewski’s overbearing cleverness prevents him from sustaining any emotional momentum as an ill-conceived footnote soon appears to yank the reader right out of any sense of foreboding and right back into boredom and distraction. These looping footnotes do parallel the house, but the fact that the effect makes sense doesn’t make it particularly pleasant to experience. I’m not at all a fan of self-referential meta-literature like this, so in a sense I was pleasantly surprised. However, the book has too many loose threads and too many internal distractions to actually achieve its intended effect, and I rolled my eyes too often to ever be actually frightened. The ideas are solid and there really is a terrifying, complex, and surprising horror story buried here, but the book’s too-clever execution obscures its actual merit.