![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/house_of_leaves.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\nHouse of Leaves<\/i> is one of those rule-bending, genre-crossing books that’s hard to describe without resorting to (unfair) comparisons to other works. I was tempted to make some but managed to quell the urge.\n<\/p>\n
\nJohnny Truant inherits a suitcase filled with the writings of an old man called Zampano. Zampano has written a purportedly documentary story about Will Navidson. And Zampano’s book is supposedly based on documentary material (video footage, photos, diaries) by Navidson himself and his family.\n<\/p>\n
\nThus,
\nYou are reading a review written by
\nme about a book by
\nDanielewski consisting of papers edited and commented by
\nTruant, written by
\nZampano, based on material recorded by
\nNavidson, who then finally has first-hand experience of the events described.\n<\/p>\n
\nUnderneath and inside all of this, it’s a story about a haunted house, where the inside dimensions seem larger than the outside. Then one day a door appears, on the inside of an outside wall, leading off into a dark, cold unknown.\n<\/p>\n
\nNavidson becomes obsessed with exploring and understanding the house. Zampano appears to be obsessed with documenting and analyzing Navidson’s explorations. Truant is definitely well beyond the point of obsession, in fact he’s losing touch with reality due to all this.\n<\/p>\n
\nReading this book takes some patience. It’s a good 700 pages, to begin with. The stories are labyrinthine and sometimes hard to follow, frequently split between the body of the page and several layers of footnotes. Oh, and there’s appendices, too. Neither the footnotes nor the appendices can be skipped because they contain essential parts of the various stories. It’s got various typographic “enhancements” such as text upside down, on the side, in one corner of the page only, etc.\n<\/p>\n
\nIt takes some effort to read, but it’s fun. And it may be gimmicky, and it may have a bit too much of pretentious showing off the author’s smarts, but it’s original and fresh. It is rewarding if you read it as the experiment and puzzle it is, but probably less so if you approach it as a horror story.\n<\/p>\n
\nAmazon US<\/a>, Amazon UK<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" House of Leaves is one of those rule-bending, genre-crossing books that’s hard to describe without resorting to (unfair) comparisons to other works. I was tempted to make some but managed to quell the urge. Johnny Truant inherits a suitcase filled with the writings of an old man called Zampano. Zampano has written a purportedly documentary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[77,80,140,152],"class_list":["post-883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-book_review","tag-fiction","tag-horror","tag-mark_z_danielewski"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=883"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18387,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883\/revisions\/18387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}