Rating: 
Summary: it's aMAZing (bad joke, i know)- original and intriguing
Review: If you like the movies Fight Club or Mullholland Drive, you'd probably get a kick out of this novel. Following the multi-layered plot of House of Leaves is sometimes difficult, but if you piece together the multiple plot lines of the entire novel, the overlapping thematic strands are quite interesting, and pretty obvious. It's not your average Harry Potter read (no offense intended to fans); there's quite some depth to the book, and in looking into a general overview of the author's life at the time he wrote it, one understands that the book speaks of the figurative inner labryinths of our minds and consciousness through the literal descriptions of the maze of the house. It's a unique and experimental novel, and plays with your head (in a good way). The narrator and the book he's talking about are represented simultaneously in the text, so I recommend reading a few pages of Johnny's story, a few of Zampano's, and go back and forth as such (don't read all of one story and then all of the other - it won't make any sense that way). The parallels between the two stories are intriguing, and in the end you'll understand what's up with Johnny. The format of the book alone is art; very original, very postmodern. If you're into different areas of art weaving together, I suggest listening to his sister Poe's cd Haunted before reading the book (to better understand the psychological basis for the novel). Reading the poetry in the back of the book also clarifies the theme and plot a bit more. I suggest not reading about the house as a literal object, but as a symbol for the inner workings of the mind - it will make more sense that way. Scary, provoking, and wickedly original, House of Leaves will weave in and out of your consciousness for months after reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Oh jeez, Mark!
Review: I've never read Pynchon, I've never read Pale Fire, I've never read Ballard, or Wallace, or Dean Koontz or Stephen King or Derrida or any fawqing semiotics. I'm stupid, and uninformed, and the Oulipo, Beckett, Robbe-Grille and Roland Barthes are the extent of my education into post-modernism. I never read scary stories. A pretentious maelstrom of pseudo-intellectualism impresses me. And I really, really like thinking about big empty rooms. Being as I am, I liked the Navidson Record portion of this monstrously expensive hunk of paper. It absorbed me. I got sad when my favourite character died. And hell, I put a picture of a spiral staircase on my wall. The Johnny Truant storyline bored me to tears, though. I just didn't care. But if you're like me (i.e. stupid and easily impressed by kitsch and showy BS) than by all means, knock your dang socks off and impress the waifish hipsters in tiny Bright Eyes t-shirts...but please, if you've got some background, some education, or you're a connosiuer of scary stuff, save your money and spend it on the cool s--t I know you know all about. And Danielewski...um...please...for the good of the written word...quit.
Rating: 
Summary: EW
Review: This book is AWFUL!!!
PLEASE IF YOU LOVE JESUS DON'T READ THE HORRIBLE HORRIBLE EVIL BOOK OF DANIELWEKSKSISKSISIKSKISISISIS.
Rating: 
Summary: Into the depths
Review: An astute reader can come to gauge a writer through what he produces. And if this is so for "House of Leaves, then Mark Danielewski is a swirling mixture of the mad and the magnificent. This book is unlike any other that I have ever read -- hard and surreal, strange and magnificent. Will Navidson moves into a house with a secret, a door that leads into a bizarre tangle of stairways and passages. After his experiences are put down in the Navidson Record, a blind man named Zampanò makes further studies of the house -- and then the tattoo artist Johnny Truant, after Zampanò's death.As the reader goes deeper into the house (the word "house" isusually printed in blue), reality and perception start to warp... Trying to explain "House of Leaves" is like trying to explain "Mulholland Drive" in one sentence. Summarizing is hard enough; summarizing it briefly is virtually impossible. But if the actual story of "House of Leaves" is fantastic, then the way it's written is even better.It's sprinkled with anecdotes, letters (often with crossed-out lines), footnotes, lists, appendices, and pseudo-interview snippets from people like Anne Rice, Camille Paglia, David Copperfield, Stephen King, and Stanley Kubrick. There are pages that are entirely blotted out, or have only a single word, or are printed upside-down, sideways, tilted, running into a mess of letters, or in a spiral. There is poetry, pictures of tattered pages, musical notes, collages and paintings. Danielewski's style is amazing. It's in flux -- some parts of it, in keeping with who wrote it, are dry and flat (Zampanò), and some are more casual (Truant). But as the book grows darker and more surreal, it doesn't alienate -- instead, it draws you in and warps how you see the world for just a little while, as if the book is reaching out of its pages to grab the reader's brain. Almost like the house, one might say. The kind of terror and horror in "House of Leaves" are not the kind you read in hack horror books, where something transforms or a nasty thing leaps out of the shadows and eviscerates screaming extras. It's a creeping, subtle thing, like oil dripping over the surface of a pond. It's like a hallucination, surreal and continually shifting, where the laws of physics don't apply. This genre-busting post-modernist book is like taking a rollercoaster through a Dali-designed funhouse. Alone in its genre, it's a work of art. It will scare you, twist you, and linger in your mind without cheap tricks or flashy devices. Astounding.
Rating:
Summary: Just because you have something to say....
Review: ...doesn't mean you should say it. The problem with House of Leaves, like most post-modern scribblings, is that the "author", completely bereft of any literary talent, has to resort to gimmickry and kitsch with which to entice his audience. Sure, it's imaginative, but it's not true literature. Why? For one thing, there's no plot. One of the more important components of literature is an actual storyline that hooks the reader. House of Leaves doesn't concern itself with such triviality. Nor does it attempt to develop memorable characters or even coherent prose. Instead, Leaves is merely an amalgam of everything that is wrong with modern culture -- flashy, experimental, and downright irritating. Danielewski prides himself on his "film like" construction of the book, but this leaves one wondering -- if he was intent on forging a unique cinematic experience, why not pick up a camera? The fact is, Danielewski doesn't know the first thing about film, literature, or anything resembling appreciable art; his strengths lie in experimenting with typography and cryptography -- not exactly gripping reading material. Like most "high-concept" art, House of Leaves is nothing more than a house of cards -- a poorly constructed shell slapped together with whiz-bang novelties and tossed in the general direction of the public. The blow-in card advertising his sister's cacophonous rock band was a nice touch, rounding out the complete corporate-sellout handbook. I suppose if you read Joyce's Finnegan's Wake on a regular basis or are currently matriculating at The New School, then House of Leaves might just be your taste. However, the rest of us should go in search of something more fulfilling.
Rating:
Summary: Fun and disturbing ride through several psyches
Review: Mark Danielewski is either a genius or a certifiable maniac. I've never experienced a book anything like House of Leaves. It is certainly the most interactive experience I've ever had reading a book. For the uninitiated, House of Leaves is a multi-layered book with a history. Passed around the internet (according to the notes), it gained a cult following among the misfits who most identified with the struggles of Johnny Truant, tattoo artist and general layabout. I'll describe the book's contents as basically as possible: Will Navidson and his family moved into a house in Virginia to find that a door that was supposed to contain a closet, actually opened up into an area of hallways, stairwells, and unpredictability. Realistically, the room should not have been there, as the door was on the side of the house and a film made by Navidson showed that nothing was on the other side of the wall but the yard. Navidson and friends explore the area and film their exploits into what became known as The Navidson Record. A blind man named Zampanò wrote (or rather dictated) an academic exploration of the film in a book of the same name. His descriptions of the film and other people's thoughts on it comprise the bulk of House of Leaves. After Zampanò's death, his neighbor, Johnny Truant, found the manuscript in pieces in his apartment and spent a lot of time compiling it into readable form. While doing this, he took the opportunity to comment on various sections (via footnotes) that related--however tangentially--to his own life. These footnotes range from sentence fragments to several pages. This is a second story separate from the Navidson tale, but as the Navidson tale is often so suspenseful within its telling, Johnny's life story is a nice break. Also, where Zampanò's writing is very dry and terse, Truant's is, of necessity, off the cuff and very stream-of-consciousness, which, considering Johnny Truant's different states of consciousness, is an experience in itself. A second editor also appears and makes comments on both Zampanò's and Truant's various comments in a third font style in the footnotes, thus making the reader keep up with three very different voices that can change at will at any point in the narrative. Another difficulty in reading House of Leaves is that the formatting is not always consistent. Often there are only a few words per page, or they'll be upside down, or coming from the corner fo the page, or a footnote will appear in the middle of several pages, or whatever Danielewski happened to dream up at the time. Plus, the word "house" always appears in blue, no matter its use. Even on the cover, see? Strange and thrilling, mostly because I don't understand it. Further drawing you into his strange world are the appendices at the end of the book, containing notes, photographs, excerpts, clippings, and other manifestations of the story of the house on Ash Tree Lane and Will Navidson's trek through it, Zampanò's obsession with it, and Johnny Truant's disdain of anything unlike it. But as much as this may seem like a turnoff, this is exactly what attracted me to the book in the first place. House of Leaves is a book for the reader who wants to be challenged by a book, to have his/her way of thinking twisted for a while. The reader who wants no part of reading to be difficult is going to be instantly turned off by this book. That person just needs to stay in their little house, going about their business, and never come near Danielewski's book. The rest of you--the one's you got here by typing "House of Leaves" or "Mark Danielewski" into your search engines--are the ones that this book was written for. Step forward, steel yourself for the blow, and acquire yourself a copy of this book. You think David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest with all its hundreds of endnotes was challenging? Good. Now you're ready to take the next step. Welcome to the House of Leaves. Come on in.
Rating:
Summary: Watershed of high postmodernism
Review: I agree with many of the comments below, though I would add a couple things. The first and immediate problem is cramming this book into a genre. It is not simply "genre-bending"--it questions the very idea of "genre" as such. In this light, as others have said, it cannot be approached as a "novel" strictly speaking. There has long been hostility among academics for people who expect everything to be an "easy read". Yet this book can't be approached in the same way as the celebrated pinnacles of high modernism like Ulysses or White Noise. Neither would I imagine people like Harold Bloom or Thomas Foster (who would actually read his book "How to read literature like a professor"?) have good things to say about this work. If Joyce's Ulysses was the landmark novel of high modernism in the twentieth century, Danielewski's House of Leaves is arguably the greatest novel of the twenty-first century (so far) and, I think, is possibly the watershed of high POSTmodernity. The San Diego Tribune was, I believe, perfectly justified in comparing Danielewski to Melville, Joyce, and Nabakov. Any attempt at paraphrasing the work would be sacrilegious as seem to be most interpretations of it. One exception is a review quoted on the back cover: "A love story by a semiotician. Danielewski has a songwriter's heart as attuned to heartache as he is to Derrida's theory on the sign". More accurately, this work is the penultimate manifestation of Derrida's deconstruction of philosophy and literature (although it is arguably still "(phallo)logocentric"). Danielewski's erudition is astonishing, though not for its own sake: rather, for what he does with it. He is not a scholar; he is, indubitably, an artist and his excursus on Heidegger, Freud and the uncanny (unheimlich), Derridan deconstruction, as well as his appropriation of the horror genre makes the book unsettling in a way only a novel can. Danielewski is keenly aware of the power of images to unsettle us (e.g., the Matrix or, alternatively, any number of horror films, particularly the older variety as opposed to the rivers-of-blood slashers today) and he shows us how text (viz. words) can unsettle us even more profoundly. Since the use of words (language) is the way by which we structure the world, Danielewski uses this fact to use his text (the text itself in some places) to disturb the very thing by which we make sense of the world--he disturbs our security at our conceptual roots. The "monster-in-the-dark"--the unknown--is unsettling per se; Danielewski unROOTS us until we are left hanging but by a thread to the habits and nomological security of language with which we operate on a day-to-day basis. It is not what might be in the dark or what the dark conceals that leaves us frightened--it is the dark itself. He has, further, in a single swoop, preempted (or at least undermined) the very possibility of an exegesis of his work and the hermenutic discipline in toto (I suppose I could also have said "he has undermined hermenutics as a discipline"). (Whether or not he intended to do so is, of course, patently irrelevant.) Danielewski has provided, too, a commentary on the metanarrative involved in the consideration of the book as a physical object and, as such, an object of representation and aesthetic judgment (inverting the dialectic of form and content, showing how the book itself (the form) can be evaluated aesthetically). There are those who like to call themselves "bibliophiles" or, to adapt another term, "petit-intellectuals" who make claims about what "good" literature is (e.g., it has to have a coherent plot, substantial character development). While, of course, everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, obviously this book will not draw favorable readings from those tied inexorably to the sacred literary canon. These are the same ones who hold "the new left" or "cultural studies" to be convenient labels for everything bad that has happened to "literature" over the last half century; these are also the same individuals to whom the word "postmodern" elides all the vulgarity of contemporary culture. These are, finally, the same ones who do not care to make analytical distinctions between postmodernism and, say, kitsch, and who seem to believe postmodernism simply means "anything goes". To this all I can say is that this understanding of "postmodernism" is, to say the least, incomplete and consequent judgments irresponsible. It is easy to lambast things one does not like; it is another thing entirely to critique a thing while at the same time doing it justice.
One doesn't have to be an academic or a literary critic to read this work, but at the same time one cannot expect it simply "to tell a story". Respectfully I must disagree entirely with the reviewer from Phoenix who said this work was neither art, postmodern, controversial, nor good. Granted "postmodern" is a fairly ambiguous term, this reviewer apparently doesn't understand, first, what "postmodernism" means and, second, that a postmodern work would be suspicious of anyone calling it "good" or "bad" and taking that judgment on good faith. Neither does this reviewer seem to understand the history of literary criticism that is invoked in his/her critique of the book's narrative structure ("confusing" seems to be a common word). Sure the narrative is borrowed from Nabakov, but the narrative structure of House of Leaves is meant to be self-reflexively critical--it is meant to challenge and question the notion of "narrative structure" AS SUCH. This reviewer said, too, that "it pains me to think this book was published". I agree: it pains me to think this book was published, for Danielewski has opened himself up for the barbs and stings of Nietzsche's plundering soldiers who trample through a book "take a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole".
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent, Spellbinding Tale of Terror - And So Much More
Review: Anyone who, after reading this book, dismisses it as "pretentious" or a "concept" book, clearly is unable to appreciate good horror fiction when they read it. That's too bad - by not understanding this excellent work they're missing out on a novel that is many heights above the vast majority of modern horror novels. By dismissing the format as a gimick, you fail to understand that the novel, like the house, is larger on the inside than the outside. The ideas that Dainelewski presents here go far beyond a simple scary story, which is what those who would compare this to the Blair Witch Project are missing as well. The BWP, while it is an interesting cross of film genres, is still in its essence just a film. House of Leaves seems to have the intellectual impact of a play, the raw emotion of music, and the artistic beauty of visual art while being wrapped in the bonds of a novel. It doesn't merely cross genres, it crosses mediums in a way that few works of art are able to - and that's why it's worth the read.
That, and it's one
*h e c k*
of a scary story.
Rating:
Summary: Lost in a House of Blue
Review: It seems to me that this is one of those works where people either absolutely love it, or absolutely hate it. I love this book. I've never read or heard of anything that could keep me so (insanely) interested. I'm working my way through my third reading of this book, and every time I read it I pick up something I've missed before. Like Navidson, I keep going back into that house, looking for answers (for ANYTHING) to make sense out of the sorrow and chaos. Anything to put all the pieces together, but the house only offers more questions, and the answers can only be found inside yourself. If you are considering this book, I definitely recommend purchasing Poe's album "Haunted" as well.
Rating: 
Summary: So pretentious it hurts
Review: I was enticed to read this "work" because of the rave reviews it has received here. I hope that mine, combined with the several other negative reviews, will dissuade others from embarking on this monumental waste of time. It pains me to think this book was published. There are talented authors out there putting pen to paper and developing haunting, timeless tales. Often, there is little chance that their works will ever be distributed, because publishing companies would rather seek out bloated, self-absorbed material like "House of Leaves," which can be marketed as "post-modern." I've been told this book is a "story-within-a-story," but this much-used literary device seems lost in the quagmire. Generally, such a technique only works if a) the stories can be logically connected and b) BOTH stories could more or less stand alone. What I assume to be the main story in "House of Leaves" is about a house that I think appeared in some form in "The Haunting of Hill House" and a myriad of [similar] works. This story, while potentially an interesting, independent story, is lost because of a bizarre and totally uninteresting and unrelated "second" story about a young generation-nobody with all kinds of problems that sound rivetingly like an episode of 90210. This second story could never survive on its own without significantly more substance. Oh, dear, Mr. Truant has phobias. Well, isn't that remarkable. Perhaps if the author had investigated the nature of phobias and derived a discourse about that mental challenge for a separate novel, this story could be interesting. Here, it's written in the footnotes as a long-winded, pointless ramble about sex and isolation that has clearly been designed to create convolution in the thin plot of the "main" story. This book rates at several hundred pages, but the actual story could have fit in a collection of short stories. Yes, like feces on canvas can be construed as art, random footnote placement and upside down text can be seen as a magnificent post-modern commentary. However, to those who do not see art as merely a means to be bizarre, this "technique" is just an annoying, unoriginal attempt to extend the novel. As a literary device, the text format does little to "lead you along" with the same confusion as the novel's characters face in their explorations. I suppose stretching the phrase "and the rope snapped" onto several pages may work if a reader is so engrossed that he or she could barely wait to find out what happened. Such is not the case with "House of Leaves." Before a reader can become interested in the story, the author takes another detour into his own pretensions, then returns to the other story after our interest has waned. This book is simply not art. It is not "post-modern," or controversial, and most importantly, it is NOT a good book. Basically, the book is mindless drivel most likely aimed at college students who still find awe in poorly articulated defiance. For anyone else, you would find more post-modernism in Reader's Digest and more fright in an Anne Rice novel.
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