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A review by herbivore
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
5.0
Reading the reviews, I was expecting myself to find this book either pretentious, or maddening. When I hit the bit with the excessive footnotes that carried on for 5+ pages detailing various fixtures that could be on a house, I decided it was more of a satire of academic writing, and I'm confused why others who actually read this book didn't think the same. Outside of the academic texts and excessive footnotes, there isn't much that is pretentious about the book. As for the "maddening" part, I didn't feel it at all, until I did.
I thought it was silly that people allowed a book to affect them so severely. I myself love horror, and have become pretty used to distancing myself from it. I love the feeling of being scared, so I tried to feel it when Johnny says to imagine something terrible looming just out of your line of sight, but I didn't feel it. I never felt very scared while reading the book, but the anxiety rose in my life outside of the book, while I wasn't directly reading it. House of Leaves forces you to think while consuming it, so there is no way to get around thinking about it on your freetime. Eventually, I found myself very anxious of the dark and being alone. It wasn't so much that I was scared of the things themselves, but constantly relating things in my daily life to events and people in the book is what made me uncomfortable. For some reason, I was letting the book get to me. I was seeing it everywhere, and it was very unsettling.
Even then, writing this, all I can think of is the lengthy academic passage about being unsettled. The book is written to make you feel like Johnny Truant, forcing you to try and draw meaning where it may or may not exist, and connections where there are none. It's just a coincidence, surely.
Where this book really roped me in the first time and made me feel like House of Leaves was more than a labyrinth of a book, was on page 72 where the book allows you to search the appendix and find the Whale letters. Reading the letters and cracking the code was a weird experience for me. It didn't help that Johnny's mother reminds me a lot of my own, and thus drew me further into comparing my own life to Johnny's experience.
For my future self who might re-read this and anyone who likes to listen to music while reading: the Hyper Light Drifter soundtrack is the perfect complement to this novel and really brings out the unease.
I thought it was silly that people allowed a book to affect them so severely. I myself love horror, and have become pretty used to distancing myself from it. I love the feeling of being scared, so I tried to feel it when Johnny says to imagine something terrible looming just out of your line of sight, but I didn't feel it. I never felt very scared while reading the book, but the anxiety rose in my life outside of the book, while I wasn't directly reading it. House of Leaves forces you to think while consuming it, so there is no way to get around thinking about it on your freetime. Eventually, I found myself very anxious of the dark and being alone. It wasn't so much that I was scared of the things themselves, but constantly relating things in my daily life to events and people in the book is what made me uncomfortable. For some reason, I was letting the book get to me. I was seeing it everywhere, and it was very unsettling.
Even then, writing this, all I can think of is the lengthy academic passage about being unsettled. The book is written to make you feel like Johnny Truant, forcing you to try and draw meaning where it may or may not exist, and connections where there are none. It's just a coincidence, surely.
Where this book really roped me in the first time and made me feel like House of Leaves was more than a labyrinth of a book, was on page 72 where the book allows you to search the appendix and find the Whale letters. Reading the letters and cracking the code was a weird experience for me. It didn't help that Johnny's mother reminds me a lot of my own, and thus drew me further into comparing my own life to Johnny's experience.
For my future self who might re-read this and anyone who likes to listen to music while reading: the Hyper Light Drifter soundtrack is the perfect complement to this novel and really brings out the unease.