Summer Reading Series: Fiction
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
This modern classic of metafiction is not exactly beach reading (unless you’re renting a cottage in Innsmouth), but it does serve as good company during restless summer nights.
The labyrinthine structure of the book itself invites re-reads and new explorations to discover secret passageways through the book’s multi-layered plot. This is my third time through – and I am not particularly one to re-read books.
House of Leaves is largely centered around a family who discover one day that the inside of their house is somehow bigger than the outside. Soon after, a door to a non-Euclidian hallway appears, and things get stranger and stranger.
This core story is framed as a film, the contents of which are described to the reader through the medium of an academic analysis of this fictitious film, complete with footnotes to sources both real and fictitious.
The contents of this analysis are assembled (with ample commentary) by one Johnny Truant; and if you’re lost already with how many Matryoshka doll layers we’re in now, don’t worry, that’s kind of the idea.
In practice the text is much more readable than what I’m describing here, made more comprehensible through clear delineations of typography – helpful, especially as the narrative layers start to bleed into each other.
Anyone proximally interested in either horror or seeing how far a mainstream book can push experimental text formatting owes it to themselves to grab a copy.
Get the full color version (no, there are no pictures, and yes, it matters) – eBook readers take heed, the structure of the text invites frequent flipping around of either the book – or your head.
-Alex