A review by brnineworms
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

dark mysterious slow-paced

3.0

“This is not for you.”

House of Leaves is... a lot. I think its greatest weakness is that it’s just too damn long. I like the experimental stuff but it takes too long to get there and the characters we follow along the way aren’t particularly likeable. Johnny is the most fleshed-out character by far, but his tryhard irreverence tends to rub me up the wrong way, as does the way he talks about women. But there are glimmers of sincerity which make him a little endearing. And there are some really beautiful bits of prose. Some phrases I liked:

“that air was almost too bright to breathe”

“gut-wet docks”

“Possess. Can’t get that word out of my eye. All those S’s, sister here to these charred matches.”

But yeah. That experimental stuff I mentioned – playing with format and typography and whatnot – didn’t get under my skin the way it seems to have done with other readers. I can appreciate the way

the lines on pages 440-441 are arranged to resemble the rungs of a ladder, and force the reader’s eyes to scan upwards as though they were themself scaling this ladder like Navidson

– that’s good shit! But it’s not mind-blowing.

I’ve seen tons of poems where the stanzas are shaped like the subject – I’ve written poems like that. I’ve assembled collages. I’ve cut out sections in pages to leave empty gaps or to let other pages intrude. I love love love that stuff, but maybe I’m too familiar with it for it to shock me.

I remember reading one person’s account where

they realised that the word house had been blue the whole time (they hadn’t noticed initially and went back to check). The thing is, I’m reading the paperback edition where house is slightly greyed instead of bright blue, and still I picked up on it immediately.

So do you have to roll a nat 1 perception check for the mindfuckery to work? But also you need to have an impeccable memory to notice the contradictions and connections over the course of 700 pages?

I dunno. House of Leaves reminds me of both Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Both of those books, however, are around 250 pages long; House of Leaves is considerably longer than both of them combined, and it’s a slog. There are parts I really liked and aspects I can appreciate abstractly, but overall I didn’t like the book as much as I hoped I would.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

drugs and alcohol, dereality, hallucinations, body horror/dysmorphia, paranoid delusions, institutionalisation, guilt tripping, child abuse, violence, gunfire, injury, blood and gore, death (including animal death), suicide, grief, misogyny? (sexual objectification; incessant horniness, at least), sexual assault, cheating