Approaching The House
I'm a massive horror and weird-fiction fan but I did not discover Mark Z. Danielewski's novel House of Leaves on my own. It sought me out. When my brother asked me last year if I'd read it, I had no idea what it was. When I looked it up, my first thought was "how on Earth have I not heard of this?". My second thought was "I'm a bit scared to read this."
I'm a believer that books can change your life. They can change your mind, they can even change the way you think. I worried, given this book’s reputation: What sorts of thoughts will I be thinking while reading this? How will I feel after I finish it? If I finish it? I had the sense that this book would be an undertaking beyond the act of simply reading it, itself a significant one given its page count. I doubted my ability to tackle another "Infinite Jest" at this moment in my life, even if it did prove worthy of the comparison.
So I didn't rush to read it. The book drifted to the bottom of my mental TBR, until I found out about You Will Die in This Place, a TTRPG by Elizabeth Little. After hearing about this, what it was, reading it myself and then backing it because it's an incredible piece of work, I realised that The House of Leaves had caught up to me once more. There was no hiding from it any longer. I'd already entered The House.
Looking Around
Within the novel is the story of the relationship between Will Navidson & Karen Green. As a renowned photojournalist and documentary film-maker Will’s workaholic lifestyle has taken priority over their relationship, causing them to drift apart emotionally. As part of a commitment to heal the rift that has opened between them, they move to start a quiet life in suburban Virginia with their two young children Chad & Daisy. They soon discover something unusual and unsettling about their new home however when a mysterious hallway of impossible length appears in it. Will’s documentarian instincts take hold and he quickly becomes obsessed with the hallway which, upon exploration, seems to be infinite: Containing doors leading to other hallways, containing other doors, to still more hallways, on and on and on…
His resulting film - The Navidson Record - becomes the topic of critical, academic and even scientific discussion, analysis and debate. Among them is an elderly blind man, writing under the name Zampano, attempting to compile the definitive account of The Navidson Record. Zampano dies before he can complete his masterpiece but his notes are found by a tattoo artist named Johnny Truant. Already a troubled soul, Johnny’s efforts to complete Zampano’s work lead him to madness, immersed in the terror of the labyrinth within the House on Ash Tree Lane.
Navigating The Hallways
House of Leaves has a reputation for being a difficult book to read. This is due in part to the extensive use of footnotes, exhibits and appendices (consistent with the academic aspirations of Zampano, one of the two primary narrative voices). Additionally - and far less conventionally - the page layout frequently breaks from standard form; changing orientation, line spacing and length and positioning. This makes for, in a literal sense, a difficult read as the natural flow of reading is constantly interrupted to shift focus to a different part of the page, or to a different page entirely, or rotate the book to be able to read the words. It’s disorientating, often surprising, occasionally mystifying. Much like the hallways of the eponymous house itself. In some cases Danielewski uses the layout of the page to literally reflect the geometry of the physical space being described. The top of a descending spiral staircase confined the prose to the top lines of the page, descending over the following pages until the narrative action reaches the bottom, words now flowing along the bottom lines of the page. Likewise movement through a narrowing passageway sees the margins expand, squeezing the description into smaller and smaller rectangles at the centre of the page till at last it's difficult for single words to fit on one line.
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| It gets pretty wacky in here! |
The epistolary storytelling gives the reader the satisfying experience of a story that is being discovered rather than told, establishing a sense of camaraderie with Navidson exploring the hallways, Zampano piecing together his opus on The Navidson Record, and Johnny Truant in turn assembling Zampano’s notes into something cohesive. It also allows for excellent characterisation through voice: There’s a clear distinction between Johnny’s fragmented and desperate notes, at times more like diary entries, at others almost a stream of consciousness; and Zampano’s more considered prose and comparatively subtle eccentricities.
The manner in which horror is created is unusual and effective. The accounts of Johnny Truant will feel familiar to readers of horror and weird fiction. It is clear he is losing his mind and that, somehow, simply from the pages of Zampano’s notes, a malevolent force related to The House has been unleashed upon him. More interesting is the horror that emerges from those notes as we read them. Zampano’s writing frequently breaks from the commonly-held good writing practice of “show, don’t tell”. This is by necessity because he is a) often describing scenes from a film, a primarily visual medium, and b) he is blind and cannot know, for example, what exactly it is about the sight of those hallways that conjured the feelings of dread, threat and menace reported by the primary source witnesses. He can only tell us what others have told him. The scenes are presented in plain language as they were intended to help the reader to imagine the action as literally as possible. It shouldn’t work but it does. Our imaginations fill in the blanks. The monsters in that darkness don’t come from the author but from the reader.
Inward journeys is a strong, if not the prevailing, theme here. Zampano’s frequent references to Greek mythology clearly signposts the space we are in when venturing into the labyrinth of the house’s hallways: We’re travelling into the mythic underworld here, into The Self. The Navidson Record documents five distinct “Explorations” of the hallway, undertaken by various parties. As these progress they reveal as much about the explorers as they do about the impossible space around them. It’s telling that the first one of them to bring a gun into that space (Holloway, a professional explorer hired specifically for his “rock solid” composure) is the first one to become truly lost within it. By contrast, Navidson’s twin brother Tom (a self confessed screw-up and coward) demonstrates an inner warmth and resilience when he finds himself alone in the darkness, telling bad jokes to the unseen “Mr Monster” he believes to be stalking him.
Discerning Shapes in The Darkness
From the outset I struggled to imagine where the scares were going to come from. What’s scary about a hallway, even if it does go on and on? The book delivers confidently on this front. This is not the scariest book I’ve ever read - the horror is present and compelling but not its greatest strength - but by the middle of the book I was looking at the hallways of my own house differently. It made me particularly more aware of the stairs. The stairway in this book is very frightening.
I found the many many footnotes and appendices ultimately frustrating. More often than not they failed to provide additional information that I found helpful or meaningful. Often enough they pointed to ‘missing’ documents, and so revealed truly nothing. Most commonly they were simply inconsequential, which led me to the conclusion that they probably are, and their presence is intended to firstly establish a sense of credibility and academic pretension to Zampano’s writing and secondly as another pillar reinforcing the sense of the labyrinth. A list of names that runs for several pages is after all not unlike a corridor full of twists and turns and doors to empty rooms. After a while you stop paying attention because there is nothing to pay attention to. It’s valid and I’m certain, intentional, but not much fun to read.
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| There is some cool stuff in the appendices |
By contrast I loved the use of unconventional layouts to describe the spaces inside the labyrinth. It sounds like such a cheap trick but I found it extremely effective. As the word count per page fell away and the white space increased, it really created for me a sense of space going on endlessly. I often found myself smiling in these sections, turning the page like turning a corner to find something I did not expect, another layer of vastness in an unending maze.
Something I Didn't Like
I’m going to be quite uncharitable about Johnny Truant now because overall I did not enjoy my time with him, and there was a lot of it. His story is revealed through his annotations, which digress abruptly into tales of his wild exploits with his friend (a drug-addicted hairdresser, aptly named Lude). In his attempts to escape the insomnia that has taken hold since his discovery of Zampano’s notes, Johnny plunges deeper into drug and alcohol abuse and pursues sex with a pitiable determination. It's clear this is an escalation of an established pattern of bad behaviour but it fails to provide him any sanctuary from the dark presence that hunts him.
So the tone of his entries veers between the gonzo energy of “Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas”, the wide-eyed horror of a Lovecraft protagonist, and the self-destructive nihilism of a Bukowski inflected douche-bag. At times he had my sympathy, at times I was genuinely curious to find out where his latest shaggy-dog story was leading. Ultimately however I just found him tiresome.
Other than a steady downward trajectory there is no consequential development for him, and to be honest I found his whole “troubled young man” shtick a bit cliche. Not to mention his womanising: I’m not kidding, he cannot describe a woman without mention of why he finds her sexually appealing, whether she is single (or who she’s seeing if not) and whether or not they had sex (and if they didn’t why not). There is a big clue as to why he is like this, buried in the appendices, in the form of a stack of letters from his mother, who has been mentally unwell for most of his life. But even with this context… To use Johnny’s own words, “So what?”
The tragic backstory is perhaps an explanation but hardly an excuse, and all to no purpose I could discern. He's no Bunny Munro, but could you imagine that story without Bunny Junior? How pointless it would be? Johnny starts off in a bad place, desperate and wretched, and life only gets worse for him. He learns nothing about himself or whatever force is acting against him.
Maybe I missed something but I really struggled to find a point to his story in its own right. As part of the whole, it does emphasise the danger of The House, and Johnny’s endless rambling is yet another echo of its endless corridors. But is it necessary? In such volume? If one thing threatened my enjoyment of this book, it was Johnny Truant, and before I’d reached the halfway mark I’d begun to register the incoming walls of Courier New (Johnny’s font) like a bad weather front. Time to stop reading for the night.
The Biggest Surprise
What surprised me the most about the book overall was that at its heart is a story of reconciliation. There are some nihilistic elements here (how could there not be, in a story framed around the exploration of an infinite void) but I believe at its core this is a life-affirming story. There are some excellently observed relationships to be found amongst the characters, especially the Navidson family. There is an authentic messiness to their lives. A true sense of relationships that have already been strained to breaking point, but haven’t broken yet because of the genuine love between them. It's a rare thing to see positive and healthy portrayals of love in any media. So often love (especially romantic love) is mangled and poisoned in service of drama - the same drama that dictates that the doomed individuals must reconcile by the end - by which point reconciliation seems neither likely nor sensible.
But here we see by stages the frost thaw between Will and his estranged twin Tom who, despite his vices and shortcomings, is a loveable counterpoint to Will’s relentless drive and dedication to his craft.
Between Will and Karen, we see a couple making the earnest commitment to repair a broken partnership and struggling. Brief moments of intimacy are interspersed with digs at one another disguised as jokes. Ultimatums are laid down, observed, and resented. The paranormal void that appears spontaneously in their home is a brilliant and terrifying allegory for the gap that can open between two people - the more it is explored, the wider it yawns, the deeper it goes. The ordeal pushes them both to their darkest corners, for much of the book it is uncertain what reconciliation is possible, or even desired.
But those dark corners are where they needed to go. I tend to think of darkness as a creative space. A potential space. In other words, darkness is not the same thing as nothingness. Darkness can contain anything, and the only way we know for sure what is there is to expose it to light, at which point whatever it is has no choice but to exist. At least in that moment. So to face the darkness within yourself is to face what you do not know about yourself. A journey into darkness is a revelatory act.
The resolution, built over 500+ pages, miles of exploration in the cold darkness of the abyss, is surprising and executed with confidence and compassion. It turned out to be a truly moving portrayal of a relationship, leaving me full of hope and more appreciative of the love in my own life.
Make Like a Tree
I could easily see House of Leaves being someone’s favourite book. It certainly left an impression and I’m glad to have read it. Addressing my initial worries about how it might affect me I think I've done ok - as mentioned above I was actually surprised by how much heart and positivity there is to be found amongst the horror, which is also well done.
As for it's notorious difficulty, I'd urge anyone with even a slight interest in reading it not to be put off and give it a go. It's quite an unusual book, at times difficult, yes, but (as Nathan Weinstein succinctly put it in Grant Us Eyes): Art is allowed to be difficult.
By the same token you are allowed to get fed up with something that's difficult. You are allowed to take a break and see if you feel like going back to it later. Keeping this in mind I never felt like I had to push myself to pick this book back up. It's a feat of storytelling to instil enough curiosity in a reader to lead them through a long story; it's something quite special to leave them with hope. And that's worth quite a lot, I'd say.
-Till Next Time!
