Weighing in at 709 pages, “House of Leaves” is no joke. Mark Danielewski’s massive debut novel, published in March 2000 by Pantheon Books, is barely a novel, and that is precisely why I love it so much.
“House of Leaves” falls into the literary genre of ergodic literature, which is known for its insanely open use of formatting. It incorporates text in various different shapes, languages and colors, and it is home to some of the most elaborate footnotes I’ve ever seen. In other words, “House of Leaves” might be the densest book you have ever read, for better or worse.
“House of Leaves” is a combination of psychological horror and the ergodic. These two genres fuse extremely well within “House of Leaves,” so well that you finish the book not understanding how they could have ever existed without one another. The plot explains the necessity of their fusion well enough: it follows Johnny Truant, who discovers the unfinished manuscript of “House of Leaves” in-universe, written by Zampanò, an eighty-year-old, recently deceased blind man who Truant thinks was a graphomaniac (someone with a pathological impulse to write, usually incoherently and meaninglessly) when he was alive. Truant decides to try publishing Zampanò’s work posthumously, and he edits the manuscript through his own footnotes (which sometimes take up several pages in their own right).
Zampanò’s manuscript was an academic study of “The Navidson Record,” a film surrounding the Navidson family moving into a new home and Will Navidson’s horrific ventures into a dark hallway that pops up in their living room. This hallway grows into a terrifyingly dark labyrinth in which the Minotaur, lying dormant in the center, is waiting to be let out and/or satiated. It is implied that Zampanò struck the Minotaur from the manuscript, while Truant has a primal need to keep it in. Neither the striking of the Minotaur from the manuscript nor the need to maintain it are further explained by the book.
As Truant is reading and editing the manuscript, he becomes more and more mentally unstable, largely due to the Minotaur portions of the manuscript that he finds through his own scholarly research. He becomes an absolute agoraphobe, afraid of the Minotaur specter that he has effectively let loose by engaging with the manuscript in the way that he has.
Because of Truant’s transformation, we cannot trust anything that occurs within the novel. Firstly, we cannot rely on Truant’s footnotes due to his mental instability, which runs in his family; his mother’s mental instability is highlighted in The Whalestoe Letters, an epistolary section of “House of Leaves” in which his mother writes to him from a mental institution called The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute. We also cannot believe anything Zampanò writes because he is a blind man writing about a film, and it is not clear if “The Navidson Record” is even real in-universe in the first place.
The entire novel highlights these instances of found documents, how much we can trust them and how much we can trust those who engage with the material. Furthermore, we learn about each character’s collective trauma through these found documents.
By the end of the novel, we can only begin to understand the toll of these documents on the characters’ psyches, the way this trauma spreads from one person to another through engagement with (or inclusion in) the found materials and how the end of catharsis is never found for anyone involved.
This does not even scratch the surface of what “House of Leaves” covers. There are still supporting sections after “The Navidson Record,” like The Polaroids, The Pelican Poems, The Collages, The Index (yes, even the Index seems to have a coded meaning) and so much more.
I personally believe it’s impossible to read this book without a magnifying glass in hand. “House of Leaves”—and Danielewski through it—are sticklers for this type of maximalist, inaccessible writing. Although I find beauty in the fact that no one will ever fully know or understand this novel other than Danielewski, others may find that extremely frustrating and impenetrable. “House of Leaves” tells readers to either deal with this or get out of the way.
Speaking of impenetrable, The Index is elaborate and confusing to no end. In this Index, there’s a list of seemingly random words from “House of Leaves.” Its gimmick is that there are some words that are listed as “DNE,” or “Does Not Exist.”
It seems that the words that “Do Not Exist” anymore are ones related to the labyrinth, the “Minotaur” (which always appears in red in the text), the house itself (“House” always appears in blue in the text) and the chambers within the said labyrinth. Perhaps their existence in the manuscript disappeared when the labyrinth itself disappeared? You will either love the minutiae of this, as I did, or hate it and make its too-tall demands the centerpiece of your next rant session.
If you are like me, and you love torturing yourself by scrolling through old online forums from the 2000s and dredging up your own theories, then you will love “House of Leaves.” You will find that its parts are all connected in ways that no one can quite understand, but everyone can palpably feel. If you are not the type of person who wants to make a research project out of your reading experience, then you will likely hate this book and find it pedantic, intimidating, antagonizing and an overall pain in the ass to figure out. This book is incredibly polarizing in this way, which has led to its small, cult-like following.
Danielewski gives us a gargantuan task with “House of Leaves,” one that may never be completed by its readers. But depending on your willingness to be a participant in this experiment of his, you will either want him dead or anointed as a saint of literature.
Michael Indovina is a junior double majoring in studio art and English with a concentration in creative writing and minoring in theatre arts.
