Rating: 
Summary: long freaky ride
Review: At first the style of writing seems a little daunting, but its a pleasant surprise to read this freaky story. Excellent writing and a story that sucks you in.
Rating: 
Summary: Okay, We Get It Already! The Novel is not an Institution!
Review: Mark Z. Danielewski shows amazing talent as a storyteller in the pseudo-scholarly analysis of a fictional documentary created by Pullitzer winning photojournalist Will Navidson.Documenting the explorations of a mysterious dark hallway that randomly appeared in his new house, the Navidson Record stirs a controversy in the academic world involving everyone from mathemeticians, to literary scholars, to pop-culture icons from Stephen King to Camille Paglia. This controversy is documented by an enigmatic blind man, Zampano. This nested retelling of the horrors of the Navidson House on Ash Tree Lane is once again nested in the retelling of how this scholarly discussion of an apparently fabricated work affects the life of the man who discovers Zampano's manuscript and sets about compiling it, Johnny Truant. The base story of House of Leaves, that of Navidson and his obsession with the mysterious hallway that seems to shift and morphy within the impossible physical limitations of his household is strangely drawing. You might question how endless explorations of a cold hallway with uniform black ashen walls might continue to be interesting, but the outpouring of emotion resulting from the concept of humanity in overwhelming circumstances allows Danielewski an opportunity to show his strengths as a storyteller. How this enigmatic hallway can bring out Karen's insecurities, the darkness that lies in the psyche of two children, the fear of failure in a tough as nails hunter, and the love of true brothers is amazing. However, this fascinating and engaging story is ultimately ruined by Danielewski's hodge-podge efforts to complicate the book. The story is often broken up by long in-depth, and often seemingly pointless analysis and commentary from experts in various fields as well as by the sexual and chemical escapades of our third narrarator Johnny Truant. Although all of this is loosely tied together through strings of footnotes and parallel emotions and occurances, it's all too much. It interrupts the suspense from building the story of the Navidson Record ruining what could have been a superb thriller. Furthermore, frequent defiance of novelistic form such as slanted writing and footnotes within footnotes seems almost gimmicky at this point. It seems as if Danielewski not only embraces these transgressions, while at the same time satirizing the tendency for analyzation within the postmodernist vein. Frankly, Danielewski appears to be a talent with much potential. However, this effort is so full with so many ideas, plot lines, gimmicks, and characters that have just been almost pointlessly spewed on the pages that the originality of the original story has been lost. As the Amazon.com reviewer suggested, we've all been freed from the conventions of the novelistic form. Danielewski insists on beating us over the head with that freedom until we can hardly see why such freedom was interesting in the first place.
Rating: 
Summary: Supercool horror/love/hedonist/experimental story
Review: I know this book has had a lot of press (it is regularly discussed on the morning show of our local FM radio station), but I would say that House of Leaves is NOT for the casual reader. For the reader who likes a challenge, however, once you figure out the basic premise of the story-within-a-film-within-a-story, things go along pretty smoothly, if weirdly. The horror story part is not shocking Stephen King like horror, it is more a sense of pervasive eeriness. I thought the ever-expanding hallway, and more specifically the spiral staircase, were very cool. (At one point, the spiral staircase expands upward away from the protagonist at a very rapid rate; his brother drops a coin which lands several hours later beside him; it is calculated that the coin fell 27,000 miles--twice the diameter of the earth--you just have to read the book). The footnotes, and Zampano's narrative, are filled with dissertations on geometry, the source of Greek legends, etc etc., but I'm happy to say that I managed to read every one of them. Despite the different format (footnotes within footnotes within footnotes, upside down and sideways and diagonal pages, etc.), I breezed through House of Leaves fairly quickly. A fun book if nothing else!
Rating:
Summary: AMAZING BOOK!
Review: Let me just say one thing to those poor 1-star rating people who got "headaches" trying to read this book. YOU ARE IDOTS! If you aren't intelligent enough to read a 700-page book then don't buy it. I am a 14 year old and I understood this book fine...didn't give me a headache trying to figure it out because I didn't need to. Don't strain your brain, so go check out The Cat In The Hat because it is closer to your reading level. Also, if you are reading this book, you read the WHOLE book. Don't complain because of all the footnotes, they are part of the story! The main story can't exist without the footnotes because it would be a little...dry. The footnotes cat exist without the story b/c it explains what the character of Johnny is feeling and why he feels that why (to a point). So to all of those who whined about the footnotes, YOU MISSED THE WHOLE FREAKING POINT OF THE BOOK! Now with my ranting and raving about the cretins who can't understand this great book done I can get on with my review. I couldn't put down this book, and I still can't. I have re-read it so many times now! It is such a good book, even better the second time around! This is a must read for anyone who likes a twisting, turning, multi-layered plot. Be prepared to read all 700 pages and all the footnotes or you might as well not buy the book! So if you don't think you could last though 700 pages of text with long footnotes, don't bother reading this book and go read something else. For those of you who are still with me, read on. This is essentially a book of a book about a movie. You have the Navidons' story about the house, Zampano's analysis and thoughts of the movie, and Johnny's experiences after reading Zampano's manuscript. It is all multi-layered and maybe a bit too complex for some people but not for me. So if you think you can handle it, enjoy, but a warning to you...BE CAREFUL!
Rating:
Summary: A fine book
Review: This is one of those books. You know, the ones you always want to find. The ones you read in a day or less from the couch to the covers on your bed. The ones you spend the next couple weeks recommending to all of your friends. The ones you want to go back and read but realize you gave your copy to a friend who of course gave it to a friend....This book moves.
Rating:
Summary: House of Leaves
Review: Very enthralling.... make sure to have nothing important that has to be done for several days when you read this book.... You will not get anything done, but you will read this book. I have accomplished nothing save reading this book and working, I still continue to reread passages and make notes. In a word: Incredible....
Rating:
Summary: Some beautiful writing, but it falls short.
Review: As another reviewer has mentioned, it is a great undertaking to read House of Leaves. I, as a lot of other readers of this book, was prompted to read it because I am a fan of Poe. (The singer, not the writer, although I do like Edgar Allan. Heh.) There are some incredibly mind-blowing parts to this book- some parts that are so well written you have to stop yourself to remember to breathe. But the format does get in the way, and the constant reference material that is thrown in between chapters, and the page flipping back and forth to keep up with both narrators gets very frustrating at times. Pretty soon the beauty of the book is lost in the chaos and I could not faithfully finish it because I was so disappointed with the development of the story. However, it is an experience, and maybe if you are more patient than I, you will enjoy this book.
Rating:
Summary: The Labyrinth is In Your Head!
Review: Watch out for the minotaur! Do you hear that roar? Finally a book for, by and about pseudointellectuals. Pseudointellectuals are so often marginalized and generally just plain screwed over by their intellectual peers. It's time they had their say and came to the fore. Yes, we like games, puzzles, things analytic, and even - horror of horrors - mathematics, and now it's okay to admit it. When I first saw this book at the bookstore, as I flipped through the pages, I immediately thought: TOO COOL! A book where you can rip out all the pages, put them in a box, throw them all out the window of your seventh story apartment, then go out and pick them up in some random order and read them. I don't usually read fiction. But, this I just knew I had to get. This book operates on several levels. It is a multidimensional text - just thinking about the layers at work here boggles the mind, an edited version of a text prepared from a film (i.e. the story has pased through many hands before it reaches you). The book mocks academic writing in it's use of excessive footnotes to the point of absurdity (most of them leading nowhere), nested footnotes (footnotes within footnotes, footnotes within footnotes within footnotes, etc.), gratuitous displays of erudition, petty remarks about the characters couched in high-faluting academic garb, etc. etc. Or to put it better, as the nondedicatory dedication has it: This book is not for you. (This of course being equivalent to dedicating the book to no one at all.) There are two stories intertwined. On the one hand you have the whacked out ramblings and sexual exploits of wannabe badass Johnny Truant, tattoo parlour extraorinaire. These are here to provide comic relief and are tolerable only if you can get over the gratuitous porn and the annoying use of "could of" and "should of" when they should be "could have" and "should have". Then, you have the story of the photographer Will Navidson, who lives on a house which is bigger on the inside than on the outside, and which grows, changes, all hell breaks loose, well you just have to read it to understand. There's more than enough here to keep you occupied for hours and hours on end. Enjoy. Other books you might like include Umberto Eco's _Foucault's Pendulum_ and Douglas Hofstadter's _Godel, Escher, Bach_. (Of course you know this already, I'm just name-dropping.) Do I sound overly enthusiastic? Whatever. It's supposed to be fun. If you aren't having fun, you're wasting your time. (For the PC thought police, yes that's elitist. You know what, I don't care.) P.S. Some of the footnotes in Chapter IX have been written backwards. At first I thought they could be read by being held up to a mirror. But, it turns out that instead of just being reversed, they have actually been typed backwards. The only way I can see to read them is to mechanically type them out letter by letter in the forwards direction. I wonder if anyone has done this yet. Hmmm? P.P.S. You'll notice the absence of the annoying oxymoronic buzzword "postmodern" in this review.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting first novel
Review: Though by no means a comprehensive 10-year endeavor, HOUSE is a gallant effort by a very creative mind. The two narrators lend to the more-than-obvious attempt at ambiguity, evidenced by the tongue-in-cheek humor of Danielewski making the main writer a blind man a la countless literary greats of the past (see Huxley, Milton, Joyce, et al), but this is not a vainglorious effort at great fiction. Once the reader realizes the premise behind the Navidsons' pets being allowed admittance into the hallway, yet moments later appearing in the backyard unharmed, then one knows, without a doubt, that there is a highly analytic mind at work. Yet the young writer's occasionally trite writing style lends to some very frustrating, and seemingly distracting, moments, i.e.--the explanation of a checkmark, which appears at the bottom of page 100+, is later explicated in the final chapter. However, this is without a doubt a very vivid tale from a writer, given a few novels down the line, perhaps may be a substantial influence on early 21st Century American letters. Get on the Danielewski train now so that you can say you were there from the beginning!
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and tiresome
Review: The story may be an enigma but so is the book iself. In the beginning, you get the sense the author is really screwing with your head and, frankly, he does a good job of it. Unfortunately, that sense of morbid manipulation goes out the window as the book gets drowned out by it's own chaos. As many reviewers have already mentioned, the book has tons of footnotes, odd pages with almost no text, text in tight columns, etc. At first I thought it was ok because he's trying to communicate the insanity taking hold over Truant or Zampano but I just became frustrated with it after a while. It becomes too much work to read this book. Perhaps Danielewski is too ahead of the times or I'm too far behind the times, but I prefer to read something that's easier to read. I loved the fact that he was challenging my mind in the beginning but I don't want to be challenged because of the book format. I know it was meant as a device to communicate the loss of sanity and perhaps to play with my sanity but all it did was (...) me off. That aside, there was some truely brilliant writing in the book and I hope to see more from him. Many people may not realize it but he's Poe's (the musician) brother. She's just as creative musically as he is in his writing. A talented pair...it will be intersting to see where they go.
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