Review by desiderium_incarnate - House of Leaves

desiderium_incarnate 's review for:

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

4.5

adventurous challenging dark mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: N/A

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

I am so impressed and confused. This book is truly remarkable and unique, I do not think I ever read anything close to it. The book itself tends to resemble what it's about so at times the contents and the formatting become a maze for the reader to get lost in. Whenever you see a typo or another supposed mistake, you tend to realize a bit later, that wait, that's an intentional detail, oh my god! The work that must have went into this is insane! I am honestly so impressed by it. But at the same time it leaves you confused and asking a lot of questions, who can you actually trust in this book, what is real and what happened then are only a few of the questions that I'm still asking myself. I also know that in a second read through I could find even more hidden messages but that is an undertaking that seems unrealistic at this point as it is indeed a piece of work. I think that people who like to interpret and analyse things can have so much fun with this, I myself am obviously pretty amazed by it. The book wasn't at all what I expected it to be but still... Wow!

As some criticism I do want to point out that this book was published in 2000 and some negative topics (mind you, it's a horror book, so there are multiple shockers there) are not put into context, that would be appropriate today.

Content Warnings