Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot; Over.
Written: Jan 26 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Extremely interesting read, blows convention out of the water.
Cons: Sometimes the clever layout and narration is too clever for it's own good.
The Bottom Line: An absolutely wild ride in book form. Read it, but do be prepared to put it down and say 'What the Christ?' a lot.
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| Action_Snark's Full Review: Mark Z. Danielewski and Zampano - House of Leaves |
Be warned, I give away a *LOT* of the plot in this review...
To quote one of the great minds of Western thought, Keanu Reeves, "Whoa"(1). House of Leaves, written by Mark Z. Danielewski, is a novel that does it's level best to throw a monkey wrench into any attempt made at classifying it within any known genre. I picked up House on the recommendation of a few posters at a forum I frequent, who described it as one of the most incredibly scary things they've ever read. While I wasn't exactly shaken to the depths of my soul by House , it was most definitely a riveting read.
Highly experimental in nature, the entire book is less about trying to paint a vivid picture of a story, and more about attempting to draw you into the world of the story. There are two main threads of narration, one centering around a hard-boiled slacker named Johnny Truant, and the other around a Pulitzer winning photojournalist named Will Navidson and his family. The brocade through which these two threads of story are woven is a dissertation/manuscript/unruly trunkload of documents also named House of Leaves, compiled and written by an old man named Zampanò. House begins when one of Truant's friends, a fellow by the name of Lude, invites Truant over to his apartment to witness the aftermath of Zampanò's departing from this plane of existence. Johnny notices a few disconcerting things about Zampanò's apartment, such as the fact that all sources of ventilation are plugged or shut off, a set of wicked looking gougles in the hardwood floor next to the old man's body, and reams upon reams of chaotic meandering prose, Zampanò's manuscript for House of Leaves.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have just lost cabin pressure - Narrator, Fight Club
Truant takes the manuscript with him, and begins diving into it. Zampanò appears to have been writing a rambling dissertation on a film that may or may not exist, known as The Navidson Record.
At this point, the full nature of House is exposed, with the Navidson family's story of existential horror being cataloged, examined, and cross-referenced through an endless labyrinth of footnotes by Zampanò, with bits and pieces of Truant's story coming in through hard-boiled, Palahniuk style prose in even more rambling footnotes that Truant has added to Zampanò's work. Zampanò's chronicles of The Navidson Record follow Will Navidson and family through Navidson's attempts to put aside his driven, almost adrenaline-junkie lifestyle of snapping pictures of the world's most violent and horrific images, and settling down with his wife (Karen) and children (Chad and Daisy). Settling in an attractive Victorian home in a nameless Virginia burg, Navidson's film does it's best to force a layer of normalcy onto things, but everything's not quite right. Strange things are afoot at the Navidson homestead, a House whose interior dimensions measure 1/4" larger than it's exterior dimensions, and things go south from there in a big hurry. The Navidson Record goes from a boring happy american family chronicle, to one about people trying to cope with living in a house that breaks the laws of physics.(2)
Upon returning from a weekend trip, Navidson & Co. discover that the house has modified itself, sporting a new doorway in the livingroom that leads to a seemingly endless labyrinth of frozen, ash-black rooms. If this isn't a big enough problem already, the door appears on an exterior wall, and should have opened into Navidson's yard. Navidson's home goes from an outpost of happiness to a place that features mile-wide rooms, spiral staircases that change height from a few stories to a few thousand miles seemingly at random, and possibly a Lovecraftian beast that is intent upon hunting down and destroying anyone that enters it's frigid domain.
Sound weird enough for you? Well, the story in and of itself is pretty creepy, as we see both the stresses upon Navidson and his family, but we also begin seeing an unhealthy obsession creeping into Johnny Truant's narrative as well, perhaps Zampanò's work has more power over Truant than mere academic interest. The chaotic nature of the story is only half the heapin' helpin' of weird that House will provide the reader. The other half comes from the book itself. Zampanò's document is a rambling, chaotic piece of dry academic prose that reads like a doctoral dissertation from Mad Scientist University, complete with a legion of jumbled footnotes. The jarring difference of writing style and subject matter gets an extra off kilter spin from the injection of Truant's no-nonsense storytelling. Add to this already disturbing gumbo of weird narration, even weirder style, and possibly a mutant prawn or two the fact that as the story becomes more chaotic, so does the book itself. Heart-pounding passages about spelunkers running mad through the endless corridors of Navidson's House may be printed six words to a page, or upside down, or crabbed at an angle, or with columnar footnotes and random boxes full of rambling text interspersed throughout the pages.
Overall, I thought that the book wasn't terribly effective at being scary. While Danielewski does a masterful job of creating a sense of reality through the dry, academic style of the Zampanò narrative, citing all sorts of real and imagined works and persons, it was just too disconnected to be an effective horror story. However, since I can't really classify House of Leaves as a horror novel, this isn't really a minus. On the flip side of the same coin however, House does tell a very creepy, cerebral story full of anticipation and trepidation, leaving the worst fears of the characters and readers wholly in the aether of imagination, which is a welcome change from the usual bloodspattering chainsaw coup de gras that seems to be so prevalent in horror novels.
The weird text was a clever way to add a sense of unreality and heighten the excitement of the scarier areas of the book, as well as make it seem like it truly is a glimpse into the work of a deranged mind. Very clever. A little too clever, in some cases, as wading through 50 pages of script with off-kilter columnar layouts and 3 page footnotes full of ramblings about The Illiad is very experimental, but an experiment in which the results point clearly toward 'Tiresome'.
Overall, I'd say that House of Leaves is a supremely interesting read, but is definitely not something that I can curl up with in front of the fire and sip a stout on a cold night while reading. The book has to be taken slowly, given time to sink in, as there are so many little nuances that it's easy to miss something very important. Recommended, but with the caveat that it shouldn't be approached with any preconcieved notions in the reader's mind.
1. Keanu Reeves is not considered one of the great minds of Western thought. - Ed.
2. If you read this book, be prepared to scan a lot of oddball footnotes in odd places(3).
3. And even footnotes that are(4)
4. Nested several layers(5)
5. Deep. As WELL as SOME VERY sTrange TeXT FORMATTING.
Recommended:
Yes
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Action_Snark
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