Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #195541 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 709 pages

Synopsis
A family relocates to a small house on Ash Tree Lane and discovers that the inside of their new home seems to be without boundaries.

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!

Ashes to ashes ...
Style; unquestionably - Danielewski's postmodern blockbuster (complete with detailed footnotes to completely fictitious academic papers, crazily long lists in mirror writing, and "experimental" typesetting which at certain points becomes out-and-out concrete poetry) is as cool as they come. But for me, this unique book also has substance aplenty: indeed, it is an unexpectedly moving meditation on love as an act of faith and on the possibility of redemption, using the intertwined narratives concerning the troubled relationships of Will and Karen Navidson, and of Johnny Truant with his dead mother, to draw unexpected parallels.

The whole structure of the novel seems designed to highlight the impossibility of any account of events ever representing "objective truth" (another of Danielewski's central themes), as we get three separate people commenting on the same events from very different perspectives. At the start of the book, Johnny Truant (a troubled drop-out with a murky past who is now working as a tattoo artist) comes across a pile of paper (one of the senses of "Leaves" in the title) while clearing the apartment of the reclusive and recently-deceased old man Zapato. These "leaves" contain Zapato's scrawled narrative, written in pseudo-academic docu-drama style complete with footnotes, of the Navidson family's experience of moving into a Haunted House. In addition to Zapato's own footnotes, Johnny Truant adds footnotes which both comment on the Navidson narrative and relate his own ongoing story. To add another layer of complexity, a supposedly objective editor (Danielewski himself?) adds his own footnotes to Johnny's footnotes! Although both Will Navidson's and Johnny Truant's tales are chilling, the whole business of the footnotes and associated postmodern trickery has obvious comic potential, and Danielewski takes full advantage of this to poke fun at various targets: at celebrity culture; at the very American genre of the docu-drama; at previous "Horror" classics of book and film; and at postmodernism itself.

It's impossible to do the book justice in a few paragraphs. However, just when both Will Navidson's and Johnny's tales appear to be becoming ever darker and heading for a horrific end (as Navidson's house spontaneously grows an ever-enlarging labyrinth of barren, ash-walled corridors which gradually "eats" various family and friends, and Johnny's deteriorating mental state seems to be leading him into a drink- and drug-fuelled spiral of violence in which he risks becoming the very Minotaur haunting the Navidson house), Danielewski pulls off the most unexpected trick of all - the possibility of a "happy ending". And it is here that the book's true greatness lies.

Danielewski ultimately gives the reader a choice between two different readings of the words "ashes" and "leaves", both of which are as omnipresent throughout the book as the word "house" (which always appears in blue writing). The initially obvious meaning is that "leaves" refers to Zampano's description of the Navidson house's labyrinth (symbolising Death) and "ashes" refers both to the charred sheets among Zampano's papers and to the cold, dark walls of the labyrinth (images of Destruction). However, towards the end of the book when both Will Navidson and Johnny Truant may have been redeemed by acts of love (depending on exactly how the reader chooses to interpret certain passages), Danielewski offers an alternative reading, with "Ash" referring to the ash tree, which was the Tree of Life in Norse mythology, and "leaves" referring to the leaves of the tree which symbolise Life and Creation. The Happy Ending therefore becomes an act of faith on the part of the reader. To say more would be to risk a "plot spoiler" - but this changes the novel from being just a witty and entertaining postmodern horror story, into being something much richer and stranger.