House of Leaves

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So...I'm going to write this review like the book, meaning, except without the effect that the book has on the viewer. There may be spoilers. Heads up.







Before I had even finished reading Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves I declared it the best book ever written and now my favorite. I've decided that if I my filmmaking someone falls through I'm becoming an English teacher and this is one of the books that I'm going to have my students read (even though kids tend to like books a lot less when they're forced to read them rather than reading them on their own, how to get around this?).

What is House of Leaves about?

Well, there are a lot of things:

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First, there's the main story (I think). It's about this family that moves into a new house in Virignia to basically get their lives back together.

They are Will Navidson, a photojournalist who won a Pulitzer for this one picture he took while in war. Then there's Karen Green, his partner and fiance, an ex-model, a seductress, a vixen.... They are accomponied by their two children, both under ten named Chad and Daisy.

It starts with Navidson, who is trying to keep his family together, just making a simple movie about their adjusting to a new house. However, he finds out while making some renovations (as all new homeowners do, right), that the dimension of the house is not the same on the inside as it is on the outside. In fact, it's 1/4" bigger inside.

Then a mysterious door appears in the middle of their living room that leads to these mysterious hallways.

Expert climbers are called in as the documentary that he's making shifts to concerning the doorway and the hall.

And hell breaks loose.

I can't say anymore, except that it's intense.


So intense.



You wouldn't believe.

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Then there's the secondary story of the guy who discovered the manuscript of the first story.

Confusing? Yes.

The whole book is a maze in itself.

Johnny Traunt (a penname) goes with his friend to see this dead guy's apartment. He finds a chest full of pages, which is the manuscript for The Navidson Record. He takes it home, meaning to publish it and add notes.

His story is told entirely through footnotes.

He is one messed up individual.

He goes insane reading the book.

It changes him.

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And those are the two main plot elements.

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Kind of.

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There's so much going on in this book that one little review on one little message board couldn't possibly hold up.

I could compare it. Sometimes it feels like The Blair Witch Project in words. The book (I'm talking about the real book here) is intense and scary. I just got sucked in. I couldn't put it down. I picked up the book, expecting to take at least a month to read it, but I couldn't put it down, finishing in a little over a week.

It can be compared in bits and pieces.

The ending is 2001 in words. And equally as freaky.

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Mark Z. Danielewski has this style of writing that's just...not normal in everyday novel writing. This novel is definitley an experient--a successful one at that.

The way he writes mirrors the action in the book. And it literally makes you feel it more. It makes you breathe faster, your veins pump, you totally shut off from whatever is in the outside world.

There are examples I can think of. Like, during one scene there is mass confusion and the pages of the book are printed with footnotes running every whichway. The directions are a mess. Some of them are even printed so that you'd have to hold a mirror up to them.

Then, the intense scenes and the strange scenes are sometimes just printed with

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one line per page. Or

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just

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a

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single

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word

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printed

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on

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the