House of Leaves : A novel

Rating:
Summary: It's all about Shape...
Review: "House of Leaves" is a visual marvel, the kind of novel that might have been written earlier if Franz Kafka had studied Daedalus' mythological labyrinth or had seen Stephen King's "The Shining," a story which sets its own chilling climax within a maze.

When you start reading "House of Leaves," you think you're just reading a slightly atypical novel about an atypical house, but after a while, the book turns on you. Footnotes stretch to span several pages, the word "house" takes on an eerie significance, and then, everything is turned upside-down, as well as backwards, vertical, and every other direction. The book has become the house it has been describing. In the same way the family in the story discovers a "new" hallway behind a door that used to open into the backyard, you, the reader, finally realize this book (this house) is not quite what it seems.

This novel gives much more than just words and their juxtapositions, it also supplies several "exhibits," startling photographs, cryptic letters from one of the narrator's mothers, and strangely enough, an index. Nothing about this novel is typical. In one rescue sequence, a rope snaps while carrying one of the rescue team's members up a long shaft. To show the action of this horrifying turn of events, the word "snaps" is spread over three pages: sn-; -a- ;-ps. This is the genius behind this novel.

The book arrests all your attention, doing more than just demanding it. It reminds one of "The Blair Witch Project" in the way that if you didn't know it wasn't real, you would believe it. You might think, "This could be the house next door or that one on the corner with the picket fence." It works the same way even if you know it's fiction; it's too enticing not to believe and too terrifying to give in.

Rating:
Summary: Self indulgent
Review: Self-indulgent post-modern hall of mirrors. If you want that, I recommend INFINITE JEST instead. Sections of inspired prose, but too much pastiche of academic media studies. Deliberately hard to puzzle out: There is some erudition, but more often the difficulty is simply the layout (mirror writing, e.g.). Frequently more attention is paid to the layout than the prose. I read SF/F/H. Stripped of the gimmickry nothing is new. Hodgson's HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND and Lovecraft. BLAIR WITCH, POLTERGEIST, and HELLRAISER. I read the whole thing to find what happens, but found it not worth the effort. Ending is anticlimactic.

Rating:
Summary: ?What the....?
Review: I am still asking myself what the heck this book is about. In the almost two months since actually reading it, whenever I happen to glance at it on my bookshelf I feel this urge to pick it up, open it, and flip through it.

Just to see if anything has changed.

I don't usually critique something from a personal standpoint, but House of Leaves is, well, a personal story. Everyone I have spoken with about it, felt that it touched something deep within them, and yet they cannot quite figure out what that is.

How to describe House of Leaves? I don't even know the genre. It's a mix of horror and mystery, and some sort of strange hybrid of accadamia. House of Leaves is narrated by a guy named Johnny Truant, living in LA, working in a tattoo parlor, just doing his thing, like the rest of us. He finds a book, (I won't go into all the details of how he finds it), called the Navidson Record, which is an academic critisism of a film of the same name. The film, a documantary shot on film and video in black and white, is the chronicle of Will Navidson and his family's move to a North Carolina house. Navidson, a Pulitzer prize winning photo-journalist decides to document the move by setting up cameras all over the house.

At first everything seems fine, but....hey, where did that door come from? Yes, one morning, Will discoveres a door where there was no door the day before. It should lead outside, but it does not. Instead it leads into a labrynth, a maze of endless corridors and spiral staircases, and one really scary howl.

Not too mention, the house is about an eight of an inch longer inside than it is outside.

Now, if this novel was written by Stephen King or any of his ilk, it may have been a good old fashioned scare-fest. It would have kept you up at night and got you to turning the pages faster and faster. But....House of Leaves is not Stephen King. Or should I say it is, run through a shreader and then taped back together, just a bit out of order. Much of the novel is straitforward, and much is itself a maze of words that run backwards or upside down on the page. Some pages have only one or two lines which run diaganol or in a spiral. Then there are footnotes, some are interesting, adding new pieces of information to the already complex story. Others, are unnecessary to actually read, but add flavor to the novel. In addition, this is a book within a book. We read the Navidson Record, just as Johnny does, but also see and hear and read is reactions to it. Through his own footnotes we get a glimpse into his story, his life. (Wait til you get to the Pekinese, it'll absolutely devestate you).

All this might sound as if it is mearly for effect. It is. And it works. Somehow, it got to me. And on an extremely personal level. The novel haunted me. Even the boring parts, and there are plenty of those, got to me. There is a method in Mark Z. Danielewski's style which you don't quite understand until the book is over.

So what is this book about? Really? I don't know. I may have to read it again. I think it is about change, the mercurial quality of life. The fact that sometimes things happen and you cannot understand why or how or what will happen.

One night, I called a friend and we discussed the book. We started noticing things. I would say, "Look on page 321, now look at 253, look at how that's written here and here." And we'd figure something else out. It was as if the author had presented us the case, and now we were finding our own clues that had been hidden, strewn, throughout the novel.

One last note. My copy of House of Leaves has started falling apart. It has changed much like the house that the Navidson's moved into changed. I told my friend. He said that his book was falling apart in the same way. And his friend's book too. And so on. Creepy ain't it?

Rating:
Summary: An interesting read
Review: When I saw this book, I was pretty nervous about reading it. Flipping through it revealed footnotes that began in an orderly way at the bottom of the page but soon crept up the sides and took up residence in the middle of the main text. Some words were blue (actually just one word), and it looked like far too much of an effort to get through.

I eventually convinced myself to read it, and I haven't regretted it. Rather than make it difficult to read, the layout and unusual style of the book serve to send the reader down the same paths as the characters. You're drawn inevitably through the sometimes scattered plot and, unlike the characters, you probably won't get lost.

One print media reviewer wrote, "I didn't finish this book; it finished me." That's pretty apt. Don't fall into the trap of thinking, "Well, I'll just follow this one little footnote to the back of the book and then go to bed." You may find that you've taken a turn that will keep you up at night.

If you want something different, definitely read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Rubbish
Review: As hyped up as this book was, I expected a lot more. It's more like a gimmick, with direct rip off's of E.E. Cummings writting style, the arbitrary overkill with the foot notes (cringe), and the desparately annoying style in which two stories are supposed to be fused to><gether. Danielewski(nice pseudonym by the way), manages to create inafectual characters, one after the other, that I found my self wishing would get killed. And the way the story sweeps between the idiot Johnny Truant (another ridiculous name) who has to comment on evey piece of the other story, the Navidson Record. And just to make this book even more pretentious still, it is told by a third party in the form of a critical analysis that goes off on tangents so frequently, I couldn't help but stop caring. For instance, in one deluge, danielewski writes a three page synopsis on the origins, and dual meaning of the word echo (begins to pull own hair out). I found have that when I intentionally skip ahead whole pages just to avoid annoying and superfluous writing, that I am not, in fact, really enjoying the book. I bought House of Leaves on a recommendation from someone I found intelligent, and I do not share her opinion. Maybe I just don't get it. I'm just a big dummy. But it still doesn't change my mind that this novel is rubbish. One of the first pages in the book says "this is not for you", but I think it's just Danielewski trying desperately to be clever.

Rating:
Summary: I hope this guy is as smart as i'm giving him credit for...
Review: This novel seems to me not at all a suspense thriller or even a tale of the supernatural, but rather a commentary on the difficulties, hang-ups and rediculous situations inherent in writing (or filming) a scholarly work. And for someone who has written quite a few papers... well, I laughed out loud at some of Zampano's conventions (especially the footnotes - how many of us have made up a few to identify some imaginary research of our own??). I was impressed beyond belief by this novel, and give Danielewski an enormous amount of credit for making a statement like this in his first novel. God help him when it comes to writing the second...

Rating:
Summary: WOW!!!!
Review: The moment I got this book in the mail, I thought it would be one of those books you either love or hate. I have to say that I definitely thought I would hate it. Surprise!!! It's one of the greatest books I have ever read. The story line is rather unbelievable, but surprisingly, the author handles it in a way that you are completely caught up in what's going on and you find yourself believing the plot. It's the closest I've ever felt to watching a movie in my head. The book combines fact and fiction in a way that confuses you and makes it difficult to identify which is which. Oh! and the appendixes are absolutely amazing!!! But this book now!!!

Rating:
Summary: Scary, but with little suspence
Review: How can you put this novel in any class or order??? The book by Mark Z. Danielewski has humor, some(but not a lot of)suspence, and creeps and chills. As a teenager reading this book, I have found that a lot of work was put into the book, but ultimetly, it lacked much depth when wanting to explain each character. Yes, I to once in a while looked over my shoulder to see if anything in the house had changed and also I had a hard time putting down the book when it was time to go to sleep. Daneielewski was able to bring in some interesting characters such as Navidson, Karen, Holloway, and Tom. But some characters could have been left out and still could have made the book the way it is. Such characters include Jed and Wax,the dog and cat, and Alicia Rosenbaum. The book had a little hint of "The Blair Witch Project" inside it, but the situation laid out in the book was so farfetched (like cameras all around the house, kinda like Big Brother) that I had a hard time beleiving it. It was clever for Danielewski to put Zampano and Trudent inside along with the infamous footnotes, but the book still needs to grasp reality.If Danielewski wants to make a sequel to this book, he really should go back to basics and not to a house of leaves.

Rating:
Summary: Too clever for its own good
Review: As a dedicated fan of the ghost story in its many incarnations, I expected great things from this book. Perhaps that was my mistake, expecting a "story." Instead, I found that the many annoted footnotes just detracted from the overall effect. This is a brilliant concept and the extreme attention to detail lends some credibility to the genre of overlapping reality and fiction. But the constant distraction of looking here and there at footnotes, half of which are for effect instead of information, made it seem like a thesis, not a novel. And as to the story itself, there's not much there. A great approach theoretically, with potential, but its basically a concept piece and not too engaging a book.

Rating:
Summary: I read this book in six nights...
Review: ... six long, scary, obsessive nights spent curled up in my hotel bed (I was out of town on business). This book... How do you explain it? Every time you think you know what it's about, another layer peels away and the big black onion you're holding begins to terrify you in totally new ways. In the long hours between midnight and morning, I found myself checking the dark corners of my hotel room just in case some small part of this story had escaped its pages and invaded my world. During each day, I could feel the book itself calling to me across the distance between my client and my hotel -- I left the book in my room so I would not be tempted to read it all day long (and probably get fired). I am not a person normally captivated by thoughts of the supernatural, but this book made me want to go out and buy a tape measure to make sure the room I was in wasn't getting larger. Read the book and you'll understand...