Rating: 
Summary: A unique reading experience
Review: "This is not for you". The dedication of this book. Perhaps it should read "this is not for everyone". It seems to me that you either love or hate "HOUSE of Leaves". I happen to fall into the former category. I really have not encountered another book like this. Maybe I should get out more. I don't know. But the "HOUSE" owned me the entire time I was reading it. It is a book that literally involves you -- turning it around, flipping forward and back, deciphering codes... Now, it really isn't as scary as everyone seems to be saying it is. Of course, I haven't found many novels very scary lately... Creepy, maybe. But not nightmare inducing. Although, I did have some pretty vivid dreams... The premise is quite thought-provoking and mind-bending. Sure, sometimes the tricks seem a little cheap (word painting, where Danielewski forces you to read sentences from bottom to top to reinforce that the protagonist is climbing, for example) but even then, I thought that these effects were useful, and more than anything - fun! I mean, why not challenge the notion of the novel form? For those who say that this is not original, then what is the other 99% of fiction currently on the market? And just what *are* you reading, anyway? The story invoving Johnny Truant, the "editor", was at times, a little tiresome (there's only so much stream-of-consciousness writing I can take...). But, in the end, you see that his story is essential. I'll just go out on a limb here and say that the folks who are preaching to others to skip the footnotes because they are superfluous are really missing a large part of this story. Perhaps, the *real* story. I don't want to say any more than that, other than that you shouldn't take this book at face value. It's certainly about more than a HOUSE. Now, not to seem hypocritical, but some of the footnotes *are* superfluous. They serve to make the fiction seem less like fiction. And why not? I think that people are smart enough to realize what can be skimmed and what can't. If you can just immerse yourself in the "HOUSE" I think that you, too, will find yourself lost in it. For those who are looking for something different and are willing to put in a little effort: Highly Recommended. All others... well, you're missing out.
Rating: 
Summary: a challenging read, but a fascinating one
Review: I had never heard of this book when I picked it up, and I'm glad. I actually meant to order another book from my book club, but ordered this one mistakenly. My first thought was "House of Leaves, that looks boring, maybe I can give it as a gift". Then I saw the quotes on the back by some of my favorite authors and wondered if I should give it a chance. Then I flipped through it and was interested by the way the book was put together. Then I read the description on the inside cover (which is mostly fictional) about the book being a collection of papers that circulated for a while on the internet, but had never been put together in a book format before, and the story about a house whose dimensions keep changing, and I was intrigued. This is definitely a challenging read, in that it demands your full attention. In a couple places, it tells you to skip to the appendices and read a certain section, then return to where you were. The narrative goes back and forth between Johnny Truant's first person narrative (told in sections and footnotes) of how the book, by an elderly blind man who lived in his apartment complex and may not have been entirely sane, came into his possession and what it has done to his mind and his life, and the story told by the blind man about...about...you know, this is really a hard book for me to describe. It has stories within stories, about 800 different typefaces (it must have driven the typesetters, or whoever did the formatting at the publishing house, crazy) and formats that include interviews, bibliographiess, letters, transcripts, and even a section where there are just photographs of different scraps of paper. I probably had the most fun with the letter from Johnny Truant's mother that you actually have to take a pen and decode, because you have to take the first letter of every word and stick them together. I tried doing it my head, but was too tired, and ended up getting a pen and just taking the time to write it out and then read it. Unlike some of the unusual stuff in the book that really turned out to be meaningless or a dead end, the decoded letter turned out to be frightening (I actually had to toss the piece of paper it was written out on because I was worried someone would think I wrote it and had lost my mind). This wasn't the scariest book I've ever read, but certain parts were very, very creepy and unsettling. Ever since I read The Legend of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, the idea of a house where the measurements don't quite add up or actually change has scared the bejeezus out of me. True, you never see a monster, but to me, what you can imagine is always scarier than anything the author can dream up-the fear of the unseen. It's what scared some people so bad about The Blair Witch Project (dang it-I was hoping I could review this book without mentioning that movie!) I'm glad I read it at home where I could give it my full attention and not have people staring at me when I turned the book sideways and upside down and even turning it in spirals to follow the bizarrely formatted text. I'm also glad I read it before I read any reviews or heard any hype about it whatsoever, unlike the Blai---arrrgh! I did it again. I did have trouble getting into "The Navidson Record", but it proved interesting. I didn't have any trouble getting into the Johnny Truant narrative--especially since the style of writing reminded me of the way Skipp and Spector used to write together (I really miss them). Recommended for those looking for something different, or who want to read something that is engrossing enough to 'escape'. Also recommended to horror fans with an open mind. Not recommended reading, however, if you feel woozy or have a headache. For instance, every time the word 'house' is written, the typeface is slightly lighter than the rest of the text, and at first I couldn't tell if I were imagining it or not. I also made the mistake of trying to read part of the book when I was getting over an ear infection and still had some 'vertigo'- I had to put it down because rotating the book back and forth was starting to make me feel like I had the bedspins. If you're bored and want to read something different and challenging, and amusing? Definitely recommended.
Rating:
Summary: No one should brave the underworld alone...
Review: What do you do when you've lost all sense of reality? What happens when you've spent three days alone in the dark? The scariest things in life live within our own minds. When I first picked up this book, I thought "what a load of crap". I had no interest in the too many footnotes, the artsy typeface, and the letters from Johnny's insane mother. The comparisons to the blair witch project abound and that turned me off too. But there's more. I couldnt put it down and I realized the labrinth chapter was perfect after I finished it. I can't stop thinking about it now. That's made it worth every cent. Some people have nothing to be afraid of. They are comfortable in their own little bubble. Some of us will spend the rest of our lives fighting the demons that haunt us. What are your demons? What do they say to you in the dark when you're alone and you can't sleep?
Rating:
Summary: THE LUCKYDOG NEWSLETTER
Review: This has to be one of the most intricate and intriguing novels I have ever read. The plot is a bit confusing at first, it dully drags back and forth between Zampano's story and the story in the foot notes. Untill all the sudden around page 100 the stories start to collide, and both sets of people encounter the darkness and the GROWLING ECHO from beyond the blackness. It leaves you breathless with your heart pounding at an alarming rate. An excellent chill to the bone. The Plot: A house thats bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, and The Author (MARK D.) Almost makes it entirley believable. This is an amazing piece of art and literature, and I say art as well as literature because you should see the actual book itself. It is a beautifully designed cover with an intruguing inside that makes it look difficult to read or follow, but as you get the hang of the twists and turns and upsidedowns and inside outs, it just makes the novel THAT MORE AWESOME, and it makes the book an excellent collectors piece. The reason I would give this an R rating: (ALL OF THE FOLLOWING ARE WRITTEN ABOUT): Nudity, STRONG SEXUALITY, STRONG TERROR, Blood and gore, VIOLENCE, medium amount of language (Mostly from the footnotes story. (THE FOLLOWING ARE PICTURES CONTAINED IN THE BOOK ITSELF): depictions of the wierd houses inside, blood spattered and caked on collages, a semi-graphic cartoon. AND OTHER VARIOUS THINGS. I really hope they plan on making this a movie, im enjoying it more than a movie, and i hope that if they do make it a movie, that they dont ruin it. This book is definitely an excellent art of literature, but beware, this book is not for anyone who cannot handle long stretches of terror and intense subject matter. THis is ACEDOG from THE LUCKYDOG NEWSLETTER: Dont get lost in the dark.
Rating: 
Summary: A Colossal Waste of Time
Review: The comparison of this book to the Blair Witch Project is not inaccurate, in that it tries to be innovative and creative but fails horribly, and only ends up being rather empty and unsatisfying. To begin with, the idea of a fictional study based on make-believe tapes of the Navidson record, is new and interesting. Execution of it, however, falls far far short of good story telling. The meat of the story takes up only a small portion of the book. The rest of the space in the book is filled with journal type entries of a character called Johnny Truant (nothing to do with the house), and intermissions of junk that have again, nothing to do with the story. Danielewski wants you to know that he's capable of quoting Jung, Freud, Homer, and in different languages, too. Most people who tell me they've read the book and liked it, have enjoyed it because it's an innovative and "hip", bauhaus attempt at presenting a story. They also like it because of the superfluous material. Sort of like, "if it's hard to understand, it must be good". However, this book isn't so hard to understand. It's simply tedious to read. It never picks up, never gets scary or creepy, and never fills the hunger a discerning reader feels when s/he picks up a book. If anything, the subplots distract like hell, and Danielewski's "gimmick" attempts at creating certain effects, like clever text placement, upside words, mirror-imaged paragraphs, annoy more than anything else. Now if I can just find that receipt so I can return it...
Rating:
Summary: What A Wild Ride!
Review: Okay, here goes! I just finished this book and felt compelled to tell the world about it. This book is not for the easily bored or the casual reader. It is a very intense and often frightening novel. No there are no physical monsters or demons chasing the characters around. This book deals with personal demons from the get go. Disregard the author's note on the cover. This is not a novel. This is a convoluted, highly intellectual piece of work. It has at least four plot lines to speak of and quite possibly more. The story centers around a family that moves into a small two story home in Virginia, only to discover that it is much larger on the inside than on the outside. Hallways appear unannounced and lead into infinity, and usually lead to some revelation about the character inside. Okay so far? That's plot one. The second plot is how the characters in the house made a documentary about their house that became the popular horror film, "The Navidson Record" released by Miramax in the early nineties. This film is watched by an elderly blind man who begins to write an exhaustive review of the movie. Okay, plot number two, still okay? Now, the old blind man dies at the beginning of the book, his work on the film review largely unfinished. It is found by a young tattoo artist who begins to organize the material and ultimately finishes it for the old man. That's plot three, still doing good? Plot four is how reading the review and finishing it literally drives the tattoo artist over the edge. The text is designed to tell you who is writing and the footnotes are a must if you are to understand the story. As you progress, you will figure out which ones are safe to skip, but I recommend trying to read as many of them as you can your first time through. Be prepared, some of the footnotes are longer than the chapters they're in and often have footnotes themselves. Also, the text is written so that you have to become involved with the story. As the characters go deeper into the halls nonexistent hallways, the text begins to twist and turn, simulating their voyage into the house. Ultimately, I found a page with nothing more than a single letter on it, turned upside down and sitting at an angle. Also, there are pages with text that looks like you're going to have to get a mirror to read until you realize that its the same text as on the previous page, just mirror imaged. All in all, this is the coolest, most involving book I've read in quite a while. P.S. By the way, did I tell you the documentary film doesn't exist? That's the coolest part cause by the end of the story you'll be swearing it should.
Rating: 
Summary: Like an old Country Joe and the Fish album
Review: It's like one of those very psychedelic albums from the late sixties, where they do all those funny stereo effects, and all that phasing or whatever it was called - all great fun but you still had to have good songs. As you'll know by now, "House of Leaves" has more tricks up its sleeve than you can shake a James Joyce at, but not enough tunes. There are two stories. One's about this, you know, uh, what can I say - house. Okay, it's about the story of the book about the film about the house to be precise, but let's not overcomplicate things. The film at the centre of it all is called "The Navidson Record", and so is the book about it. Hmmm - well, the house story is pretty good - yes, stolen from numerous genre horror movies and books, but not bad, sufficiently interesting, even a little bit creepy. (But come on, by no means edge-of-seat keeps-you-up-all-night, so I have to wonder about the encomium from Brett Easton Ellis - he should get out more.) Now the story of the house is wreathed with hundreds of footnotes - even the footnotes have footnotes, believe me - and I really liked them. They're a kind of deadly straight-faced parody of various kinds of commentators, some scholarly, some not. Very funny stuff, in a solemn, unsmiling way. Many intellectual jokes. Not much knockabout. But so far so good. However, and here's the downside, the footnotes are themselves encrusted with the random autobiographical jottings of the guy who supposedly discovered the book-about-the-film. His writings comprise story number two, the tale of Johnny Truant. And it's dire. It's most strange - I found the events of the spooky house more believable than I did the ludicrous cavortings of Johnny Truant - gratuitous sex, drugs, tattoo parlours, and existential angst by the bucketful. JT is inclined to spout off into pages of incomprehensible rantings at the drop of a tab, and it's just as interesting as someone describing their most wonderful/most terrifying acid trip, which is to say, it's really tiresome. Eventually I gotta say that JT and his pal Lude and his sexual fixations and his loony mother and his fights and his whole depressed, defeated and miserable schtick just serve to capsize what was otherwise an interesting and almost bold satire. Final note : with all the pages containing just one sentence or three words written back-to-front, plus photos and poems in foreign languages et etc this is a 400 page book posing as a 700 page book. Still big, but not THAT big.
Rating:
Summary: The 5 1/2 Minute Hallway............
Review: Horrifying......... Ever walked down a country road, wondering what would happen if that road dissappeared, with you in it? This book is geniunely scary, as far as the description of the Navidson Record is concerned.
Rating:
Summary: Scooby Doo'llysses
Review: The horror of horror stories (and by implication ghost stories, haunted house stories, creepy stories of any kind) pretty much starts to fade the instant anything definite gets said. If you hint at what the peculiar shapes made by the shadow in the corner of the room may mean, it's (possibly) terrifying. If you come all out and say, "boo, look, it's a monster!" It stops being scary. Monsters aren't scary. Nobody believes in book monsters (could be half to do with the fact that there are far enough monsters out there in the big bad world). The trick to fear (book fear, at any rate) is - keep the rabbit in the hat. The rabbit only ever disappoints. Tell us you've got something in the hat. Go on about it if you have to. Lie if that's the best you can do (so it's a rabid, bionic, nuclear, fifty-foot high rabbit, then . . .). Just don't give the game away. Danielewski has learned the trick, and "House of Leaves" is shadowplay atop shadowplay (an enormous shadowy black house that defies physical laws by existing within another perfectly ordinary suburban house). A horror story that obeys the fundamental laws of prestidigitation : obfuscation, sleight of hand, distraction. He doesn't even tell the story himself. (Hell, it isn't even a story, in the strictest definition of the word.) Johnny Truant - an LA tattoo dude - tells you about how he and his friend Lude discovered this manuscript in an old dead guy (Zampano)'s apartment. The manuscript tells you about this film - The Navidson Report - that Johnny Truant thinks doesn't even exist. The film that the manuscript tells you about is made by Will Navidson, an award-winning photo-journalist. Navidson intended to make a documentary about family life. He bought a house. Stationed cameras roundabout. Recorded what followed. Only what followed wasn't what he expected. A door appears out of nowhere upon the living room wall (a living room wall that is flush with the outside world). You open the door and what do you see? Not the outside world, that's for sure. A ten foot black corridor. You follow the ten foot black corridor. Where does it go? Another longer corridor full of closed doors. You ignore the doors and follow the corridor. It leads you into a great hall. Through the great hall into a vast hall. Through the vast hall to a staircase that takes you eight hours to walk down. You're a little freaked out by now so you decide to make your way back. Only nothing is as it was when you first passed through. The stairs are only ten feet high. Doors have moved around. Corridors have moved, lengthened, shortened. The living room isn't where it was. The shape of everything changes and what is that sound? Sounds like a creature roaring back there somewhere. The book itself doesn't keep shape : aside of the Braille, the 'lost' text (pages Johnny cannot find, pages Johnny spills ink on), burn-holes in the manuscript that obliterate letters and words, blood and claw marks, there are sentences that run across the gutter and fill two pages, words that are set diagonally at the page edge or compressed in small boxes (as the space within the house compresses). There is the now infamous 'labyrinth' chapter (footnotes in boxes, upside down, sideways, following page numbers, reversing page numbers). There are quotes in Italian, in German, in Spanish, in Latin, in Russian, in French. There are translations. The Zampano manuscript is a regular Babel (or rather, the razed foundations of a Babel, what's left after the end). Only it isn't just the manuscript (or the film) you have to contend with. This is a book that has been edited to include emailed comments from characters involved in the action from after the second edition of the book (girls Johnny and Lude have slept with who don't approve of their inclusion). Navidson is filtered (if he's real) through Zampano (if he's real) through Truant, through an editorial team, through a publishing house, through the Internet. It's neither either/or nor both/and. It's a new kind of game (on a very old board). Sort of : chess played on a Brancusi spiral with Giacometti figurines. Which for the most part is lots of crazy fun (you're reading, holding the book sideways on, turning everything upside down, reading 90 pages in about ten minutes). It's not perfect - parts of the 'Labyrinth' chapter are laborious, some of Zampano's extemporisation is plain boring and could have been cut (regardless of what Truant alleges, Dave Eggar-style in footnotes) and there are way too many footnotes - but, overall, by the time you (don't) get to the Scooby Doo-style unmasking, you've enjoyed the ride and - yes - seen genuinely unsettling things here. You develop a kind of theory as to what the Book of Leaves is (leaves = pages = the book of books), which leads you to realise this isn't a horror story at all - it's a kind of skit (like Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night, a Traveller"). Not a trick, more a clever-clever (ab)use of genre. Which is fine. And entertaining. And different (which is cool).
Rating:
Summary: Some thoughts on House of Leaves
Review: Vacationing in France, staying in a creaky medieval house, I read House of Leaves. The setting was right for this intriguing poetic,playful and haunting book about the nature of perception and being. The multi-layered plots overlap and inform each other with the reader jumping backwards and forwards through the book to read appendices, footnotes etc.The meta-narrative offers frames and layers, positively Borgesian in places,but sometimes just too glibly streetwise and punky. A curious thing. Visiting a village in Provence half-way through the book I saw a poster for La Strada - the old Fellini film. The main character of the movie is called Zampano. The narrator - blind and old (a little Borges reference?) in the book is also called Zampano. What might this signify? The footnotes drive you to seek out the booksmentioned - some real some fictional. trutand reality overlap - offering a wonderful frame from which to view our assumptions about trut and reality. Have fun... its a great and haunting read. Zeno
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