Product Description

Johnny Truant, a wild and troubled sometime employee in a LA tattoo parlour, finds a notebook kept by Zampano, a reclusive old man found dead in a cluttered apartment. Herein is the heavily annotated story of the Navidson Report. Will Navidson, a photojournalist, and his family move into a new house. What happens next is recorded on videotapes and in interviews. Now the Navidsons are household names. Zampano, writing on loose sheets, stained napkins, crammed notebooks, has compiled what must be the definitive work on the events on Ash Tree Lane. But Johnny Truant has never heard of the Navidson Record. Nor has anyone else he knows. And the more he reads about Will Navidson's house, the more frightened he becomes. Paranoia besets him. The worst part is that he can't just dismiss the notebook as the ramblings of a crazy old man. He's starting to notice things changing around him...Immensely imaginative, impossible to put down and impossible to forget, "House of Leaves" is thrilling, terrifying and unlike anything you have ever read before.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9291 in Books
• Published on: 2000-07-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 736 pages

From the Back Cover
Johnny Truant, wild and troubled sometime employee in an L.A. tattoo parlour, finds a notebook kept by Zampanr, a reclusive old man found dead in a cluttered apartment. Herein is the heavily annotated story of the Navidson Record.

Will Navidson, a photojournalist, and his family move into a new house. What happens next is recorded on videotapes and in interviews. Now the Navidsons are household names. Zampanr, writing on loose sheets, stained napkins, crammed notebooks, has compiled what must be the definitive work on the events on Ash Tree Lane. But Johnny Truant has never heard of the Navidson Record. Nor has anyone else he knows. And the more he reads about Will Navidson's house, the more frightened he becomes. Paranoia besets him. The worst part is that he can't just dismiss the notebook as the ramblings of a crazy old man. He's starting to notice things changing around him...

Immensely imaginative. Impossible to put down. Impossible to forget. House of Leaves is thrilling, terrifying and unlike anything you have ever read before.

About the Author
Mark Z Danielewski
Mark Z. Danielewski, son of a film director who co-founded the Sundance Film Festival, grew up in Utah, is in his mid-thirties and was educated at Harvard, where he was taught by Harold Bloom. He attended the most prestigious film school in America at the University of Southern California and has written a number of screenplays. His sister, Poe, is a cult rock star in the States.

Customer Reviews

More than the sum of its parts
Part academic paper, part horror story, part too-real-to-be-comfortable description of escalating insanity, part impenetrable footnote-maze, part (multi-)layered meta-novel - and fully enigmatic and wonderful, House of Leaves is one of the strangest and most memorable books I've ever read. A mere review can't possibly do it justice; isolated and analyzed, its very different and seemingly incompatible elements seem odd, frightening, pointless, sick, funny, and anything in between. Put together, though, the whole thing develops a thoroughly weird and unique attraction.
Having completed the book, I can image Mark Danielewski thrusting his fists skywards, cackling madly and roaring, Viktor Frankenstein-style: "It's alive!" It feels like something that shouldn't be alive but somehow still is.
Danielewski's creation is by no means flawless, the nuts and bolts show in places - but in most cases, I have the impression that the flaws and imperfections are intended.
This one is going to stick, keeping to the edges of my mind like shadows; never quite disappearing, and - when night comes - crawling out of hiding, demanding attention again.

Compelling
House of Leaves is one of the most original and astonishing books I have read in recent times. At first I found the prospect of getting through the book daunting - the many footnotes, the double narrative, the often bizarre layout of the pages - but I found the book hard to put down, and the stories, utterly absorbing. This is a very American book, yet it spans Time and Culture. The ghost is a very American ghost, but it is the stuff of many a common nightmare. It is the story of Johnny Truant, an aimless tattoo artist, living in LA, who discovers in the room of his former landlord, a strange collection of manuscripts. As he becomes more and more deeply embroiled in collating these, strange forces are unleashed and he sinks ever deeper into terror and madness. At the same time, "The Navidson Record" the story contained in the manuscripts is woven into the tale, a story that is both compelling and disturbing. The footnotes are fascinating, containing elements of Myth, Physics, fictional criticism (which is at times ironic and comical) Architecture, History and practically every field of Human endeavour. It is also a remarkably touching and compassionate book. It made me feel as if I understood the American psyche a little better. It feels like a great labour of love on the part of the author.

I would recommend this book to any polymath, or anyone with a love of Myth, Art and Science. It is a fabulous literary trip. Oh, and its also extremely scarey!

Into the depths
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.