Review - House of Leaves

Calling House of Leaves just a book, is like saying Inception or Rashomon are just movies. The sentence, while technically correct, falls woefully short of describing and encompassing everything that these works of art stand for. House of Leaves uses words as a visual medium, not just to make the reader imagine but also feel what the characters are feeling. One doesn’t so much read the book as they feel it, see it, live it. Danielewski uses words in a way I for one had never thought was possible. For example, when a character is climbing a ladder, he presents the words in the form of a ladder, sentences written like the rungs of a ladder.

Later, as the character crawls through an increasingly narrow tunnel, the words keep coming closer and closer till you feel claustrophobic.

House of Leaves starts with an introduction from the narrator Johnny Truant (Hoss), a tattoo-parlor employee, in which he outlines how he came in possession of a manuscript. Written by the former occupant of the house Hoss has rented, the manuscript is a thesis of a (possibly fictional) documentary called The Navidson Records. The documentary is the day to day life of the Navidson family, as recorded by the various motion cameras placed in the house by Will Navidson, a world-famous photojournalist.

The Navidson family, comprising of Will, Karen, Chad (7 or 8) and Daisy (5), move into a new house to start anew after Will and Karen have hit a snag in their marriage. Will places some motion cameras (Hi8) across the house, primarily to document their efforts and use the videos to chronicle their lives. All seems to be going well, till the family goes for a weekend trip.

Upon returning from the trip, the family discovers that a corridor, which was most certainly not there before, has appeared connecting the bedrooms of Will and Karen, and the kids. Roughly the shape and size of a walk-in closet, the pitch-black interiors of the corridors soon present a problem than unnerves the family even more than its sudden and unexpected appearance. Exploratory and rational by nature, Navidson discovers that including the corridor, the interiors of the house exceeds the exteriors of the house by a damning 1/4th of an inch.

Unable to reconcile the difference, Navidson employs the help of his twin brother Tom and a friend Bill Reston, to investigate the mysterious occurrence. As the three men explore, the house begins to grow. A door opens up in the living room, leading into an everchanging and perennially dark hallway. Accompanying the bewildering hallway is an inexplicable growl. As the house grows, Karen and Navidson’s relationship reaches a breaking point. The rest of the documentary deals with the exploration of the impossible house and the subsequent collapse of the Navidson family.

Johnny, who is transcribing the manuscript written by Zampano (which the former is finding all over the place), suspects that the latter is losing his sanity. This fact is demonstrated by Danielewski with the way he sets his pages.

As he transcribes the manuscript, however, Johnny finds himself getting increasingly troubled by disturbing visions that push him to the brink of insanity.

Thus, through the usage of odd page settings, footnotes and multiple narrators, Danielewski tells two stories, that of the Navidson family and of Johnny, and takes us into the psyche multiple characters. He does so cleverly by using different fonts and presentations for different characters (Picture 4, for example, is how he shows Tom’s POV. Zampano’s is shown with Times New Roman while a Calibri font is used for Johnny.) If this wasn’t enough, adding to the confusion is the fact that Johnny has a tendency to ramble and is an unreliable narrator who keeps changing his story every 80 pages or so.

Given all of this, it’s needless to say that House of Leaves is a complicated read. This isn’t the kind of book you sit with for one afternoon and be done with. No. You have to be invested in this book. You have to journey with Hoss as he takes you to the abyss of his insanity. You climb the ladder with Navidson. You rave and rant with Holloway. You laugh with Tom and you panic with Karen. In short, you live the book.

I have to admit that this book scared me – something that even The Shining and The Exorcist couldn’t fully accomplish. (Mrs Massey, though, is stuff of nightmares.) This book freaked me over a mere 1/4th of an inch. The ever-present growl and the maddening darkness only add to the creep factor of the book. Full marks to Danielewski for achieving that. He set out to write a book unlike anything else and boy, did he succeed or what!

At the very end of the book, Danewlski throws yet another curveball. I read the book thinking that it’s horror, only to discover in the last 15 or so pages that it was actually a love story. Don’t ask me how. Read and find out.

That said, the book isn’t flawless. The ending does leave a few questions unanswered. Chief among those is, what happened to Johnny. It’s possible that the follow-up book, The Whalestoe Letters, answers the question, so I am still hopeful.

In closing, I would say that this is a book that can’t be adequately understood in one read. It needs to be read again.

Rating: 4.75/5