Rating: 
Summary: Hmmm...Intresting, very difficult, but intresting
Review: I like odd books, and this one is the oddest of them all. It was the first five words of the book that made me get it. "This is not for you," it just jumped off the shelf at me. After the introduction and I hit the footnotes, I thought I was reading the greatest book ever writen in my lifetime. After the innitial enthusiasm though, I've been able to clearly look at the book. It is by far a great book, Danielewski deserves credit for an intreeging and creative story telling vehicle. The story itself is strong, but the re-telling of it threw anilization after anilization, and seeing the effects the story has on people is rather intresting. However, the footnotes which at first seem so great, start to trip you up as a reader after a while, making it difficult to focus on the story at hand. That's not to say it's bad, but it slows the momentum down too much at times. Still, it's not enough to really hurt the book and its inginuity. It just takes some time.
Rating: 
Summary: "This is not for you." ... but, then, maybe it is
Review: The 3 star rating is an average between those who will find House of Leaves an engaging intellectual challenge (4 ½ stars) and those who fill find it an incomprehensible mess (1 ½ stars). It's an average of the gripping tale of the Navidsons and the self-indulgent story of Johnny Truant. Like the House, parts of the work are larger than you expect, and (unfortunately) parts are smaller.If you can get past it's flaws, you will find that Danielewski has spun an interesting (and genuinely eerie) yarn (or two, or three). There are sparks of real genius in the book that can transcend the pretensions, and the unusual - though not unique, check out David Foster Wallace - style is an asset when it is not taken too far. The Good: The Navidson's and their friends are believable and given a reasonable amount of depth given the format (an analysis of a video record). Their plight is genuinely suspenseful moving from simply disconcerting to parts that are truly scary. It's relatively easy to empathize with these people. This is definitely a story worth reading! Johnny Truant's plight is also easy to empathize with, particularly for readers who can get truly engrossed in a book. The book format can be a great asset - as a means of bringing the various stories together into a whole, it generally works. It requires the reader to abandon traditional "beginning-middle-end" thinking in order to get the most out of it and that, in and of itself, can be a joy. Even the use of a colored font wherever the word "house" appears is a nice touch. The Bad: Johnny Truant isn't nearly as plausible as the Navidsons. His life is more of a post-adolescent fantasy than anything that happens in the real world - even in L.A. The insights provided into Zampano are infrequent and occasionally inconsistent - one wonders why any attempt was made at all. And the frequent use of footnotes, while sometimes an asset, hopelessly break up the emotional rhythm of the story when the tension should be highest. The Ugly: It's possible to get WAY too much of a good thing. Chapter 9 - with it's over-the-top barrage of intercut, sideways, backward, inverted and overstruck text; it's (admittedly!) meaningless lists; and footnotes that fall off into oblivion - is a disaster. Perhaps it is meant to give the reader a taste of the same disorientation experienced by the characters, but it becomes simply tedious. Later, pages and pages of emptiness interrupted by a word or two, often at odd angles and formats, certainly make the pages fly by, but this quickly get old. Sadly, none of these excesses add anything to the story. A gradual increase in the size of the margins - slightly shrinking the text - would have been more subtle and might actually have increased the feeling of claustrophobia. [BEWARE: THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH IS A SPOILER.] And Johnny Truant's descent into madness and destitution ends with ... nothing. He miraculously (and without explanation) becomes available to the "Editor" as if he's just another normal guy buying groceries, paying the bills, etc. One final note: take the time to go online and look up the Pulitzer-winning photograph mentioned in the book. Seeing this chilling image adds significantly to the impact of the book. And then look up the tragic story of the real-life photographer who took it. The real world has always had more horror in it than can ever be found in fiction.
Rating: 
Summary: Addictive
Review: Yes, the book is long, and parts of it can get boring. But if you read it a little at a time you will really start to appreciate the originality of it. The difference between this book and many other horror stories, is that you read this for the experience and not the story alone. Allow yourself to believe that "The Editors" and Johnny Truant, the man who claims to have written the book, exist and the footnotes will have more meaning. Read the apendices, the poems, and the letters. I think that if you take this book at face value- a basic story of a maze inside a house- it will not affect you in the same way as if you take in every piece of the story (storIES, I guess) and make it real for yourself.
Rating:
Summary: House of Hilarity
Review: If Orson Welles produced the Blair Witch Project as directed by Stanley Kubrick and adapted from an H. P. Lovecraft story by Bertolt Brecht, the result would be House of Leaves. House of Leaves isn't a story - it's a madcap all-out assault on reason, performed in a maze of mirrors and viewed through a kaleidoscope. This isn't a novel - it's an entertainment, par excellence. I'll be reading and re-reading it over and over again in succeeding years, no doubt exploring formerly undiscovered passageways in the leaves of Danielewski's book that will provoke greater and greater laughter for my having missed them on previous readings. I strongly suggest you do the same.
Rating:
Summary: The Magical Mystery Tour
Review: Danielewski's book slaps you across the head like - well, like something that's never slapped you across the head before. This is a novel entirely new, something not too common nowadays. The book recounts the story of a spiraling tattoo artist who stumbles across a handwritten manuscript. The manuscript, the product of a blind scholar, is a scholarly essay on a movie about a house that never ends. The house is a terrifying, inexplicable black monster that nobody can explain. Confused? That's part of the delight of this book. Danielewski wraps his story with extended footnotes, innovative graphic design, and massive amounts of meticulously researched information. But most of all, IT'S CREEPY, in a way you never thought self-aware fiction could be. A must read for David Foster Wallace fans, people writing their doctoral dissertations on the Blair Witch project, and anyone else who views "weird" as the most positive adjective of all.
Rating:
Summary: Where Do I Start?
Review: I'm not sure exactly how I feel about "House of Leaves". It's a leviathan, that's for sure. You truly have to tackle this thing and never look back. And when you're done, you'll feel exhausted. Maybe a little disappointed. I don't know. On one hand, I'm really impressed by Danielewski's (frightening) imagination. Few people could think up a project (it seems like more than a book) like this. The design is very impressive, if at times overwhelming. And I definitely stayed glued to the page. Yet I stopped just short of being completely drawn in. "House of Leaves" is pretty in love with itself, and the overall effect, for me, was one of pretension. That leaves me a bit cold. Still, this thing is quite an experience and I'd recommend giving it a try. You'll never come across anything like it again.
Rating:
Summary: a great postmodern novel
Review: Geez, this book needs a positive review, its awesome. So, to all of you why have given the book bad reviews, I would like to say that you have entirely missed the point of the style of the book, I almost said novel, but that wouldn't be entirely true. This is a true montage, a vast collection of a variety of material, presented in such a way as to give a feeling entirely different than that experienced from an modern novel. To understand this, think of the credibility you give to any documentary, to any work of non-fiction complete with footnotes and sources. Think of the way you are moved by a photograph simply by its being a photograph or the structural consequences of placing letters to the fictional editor as an appendix to the work added by a second set of fictional editors. The final result is the experience of delving into this fictional house in the same way as the characters in the book, piecing everything together, while at the same time being a little confused, overwhelmed, or discouraged. This book easily makes my top 10. I would recommend it to anyone willing to try something other than the typical novel and who enjoys thinking about what they read (better said, this is the typical novel of the digital age, the sythesis of a variety of art forms, the convergence of fiction and the reality created by image, coupled with catchy colors and swirling print in the music TV manner we've come to expect from our spoon-fed art.) Not for members of book clubs that love life affirming endings or ye Clive Cussler fans.
Rating:
Summary: unusual and disturbing
Review: I bought this book at an airport before getting on a flight.I practically had to be pried off the plane because I didn't want to be interrupted! This is probably one of the strangest and most disturbing books I have ever read. This book creates a real feeling of dread that will stay with you long after you have finished the book. The unusual writing style makes it a challenging read but it is well worth it.
Rating: 
Summary: House of Self-Congratulation
Review: This book did grab me...for a while. I'm a Gen X-er. I live in Los Angeles. I can completely relate to the atmospheric backdrop of Truant's pre-psychotic world and thought a lot of the personal storytelling rang true. I'll even go so far as to say that some of the writing here shows flashes of brilliance and is very vivid and engrossing. But ultimately I can't get over the author's haughty self-indulgence. He's clearly enthralled with his own perceived cleverness. Ultimately for me the book smacks of the over-intellectualized slacker conversations that permeate trendy coffee shops at three o'clock in the afternoon from people who don't have anywhere else to be. Don't believe the hype and don't let others snobbishly insist that if you don't like this book, you obviously don't have the capacity to handle heady material. I'm a voracious reader of serious fiction and non-fiction, but this book is all bravado and no substance.
Rating:
Summary: Get this man an editor.
Review: When I took creative writing in the 8th grade, my teacher passed out a study on writers who used Macintoshes vs. writers who used PCs. The verdict: writers who used Macs spent too much time on formatting the appearance in a creative way and less upon the writing itself. This directly applies to the fifty pages of spiraling text. If you put the text in a single paragraph... is it really that interesting? If Danielewski had skipped the hundred pages of footnotes that are useless (why read fictional footnotes? 3 pages of fictional names?) and cut Johnny Truant (can anyone argue that this character is believable? he was not charming enough to follow through with his sexual escapades, even his name is ridiculous); the story is readable. Worthwhile though? There are 15 haunted house stories that surpass this.
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