“House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski is an intricate and bewildering book that creates more questions than it answers as the story progresses. The book was published on March 7, 2000.
There are two storylines throughout the book. The main one follows Will Navidson, or Navy, as he and his family move into a new, terribly strange house. Navy is an award-winning photographer who is creating a documentary about his family’s move, but the documentary, which is called “The Navidson Record,” and is what the book is about, takes a turn for the weird. He finds a dark, pitch-black closet about ten feet deep that should jut out from the house. But it doesn’t exist on the outside. He does some measuring and realizes that the inside of his house is a quarter of an inch larger than the outside. He invites his twin brother Tom, who is much handier than Navy, to his house to investigate. Tom measures and finds that actually, the inside of the house is 5/16” larger than the outside, but this still doesn’t explain the hallway that only exists inside the house, or why the inside of the house is larger than the outside.
Navy’s partner Karen is totally against any investigation of this hallway. The family had moved into this new house to finally settle down because Navy was always off chasing an adventure. This house was supposed to be a place for them to start over, and this hallway throws a wrench in those plans. Karen forbids anyone from going inside the hallway, but Navy does anyway. He finds that it just keeps expanding into more pitch-black rooms and hallways. It doesn’t seem to ever stop, and when looking back, he finds that some of the walls have shifted, and then shifted again. He had left the door to the hallway open, but couldn’t find it when trying to get out and was lost for close to an hour until he heard his daughter calling for him from the doorway. He decides to formally investigate the hallway, but Karen doesn’t want him going in, so they call a professional hunter, who has a team of two other explorers with him, and they traverse the hallway. The first three explorations go smoothly but the fourth is where terrible things happen.
The book is formatted differently when characters are inside the hallway to show the confusion and unreal aspects of it. There are very few words on the page and they might be a line right in the middle, top, or bottom of the page, in the corner, in vertical columns, in a circle, or even upside down. The different format draws in the reader and makes them feel the strangeness of the hallway.
The second storyline of this book is Johnny Truant’s, the man who found the manuscript for the documentary and published it, told in the footnotes, following his descent into madness caused by reading the manuscript. He found the manuscript for “The Navidson Record” in his new house, leftover from the man who had lived there before, Zampanò. His obsession with the manuscript makes him a paranoid shell of who he was before. Near the end of the book, he refuses to leave his house, doesn’t shower, and doesn’t notice hours or even days passing around him. His current story is interspersed with anecdotes from his past that either help explain some of what is happening or just confuse the reader more. One of those is when Johnny tells the story of the time he almost got a dog. He and this girl had found a Pekingese dog on the road and while he wanted to take it home, he lived in a studio apartment while she said she had a yard the dog could run around in, so she took it with her. But as he watched her drive away, he saw her purposely throw the dog out of the window. He goes to the dog and sees that its head was bashed in. This story didn’t add anything to the plot, so it was a bit confusing trying to figure out why this upsetting anecdote would be added to the book. There is also a chance that Johnny was lying to the reader, because earlier in the book he told a story about him and his friend in a bar, with Johnny telling a very elaborate but very fake story to a group. Johnny had no trouble making up the story on the spot and incorporating other fake elements his friend added, so it plants a seed of distrust with Johnny and the reader not being able to believe everything he says.
This book is so wonderfully intriguing and Daniewewski does a palpable job of writing someone’s life spiraling. Although there are many fantastical elements in the book the characters themselves are so real that the book doesn’t feel all that absurd. I give this book a 5/5.
