House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski | Johnny Truant | Zampanò
One man’s discovery that his new family home is larger on the inside than the outside, by one inch. When a mysterious doorway appears, leading to a maze of smooth, ash-grey walls, Will Navidson – the house’s owner, a Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist – goes in to investigate. The Navidson Record, his film of these explorations, becomes the intense focus of a blind man called Zampanò, who writes about the footage with lengthy, academic precision. When Zampanò is found dead in his apartment, troubled tattoo artist Johnny Truant discovers his notes and inherits the fixation. As Truant becomes increasingly obsessed with the story, so too does the reader.
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Review & articles
Ah, I loved this. It’s a haunted house novel, both where it’s the house that is haunted, and where’s it’s never made clear whether it’s all in the head of our disturbed, polymath protagonist, or whether it’s actually the house itself.
Unfilmable, because how do you film a week of cycling downhill in the dark? How do you film a novel that contemplates whether it’s possible to have a structure without a centre, or a narrator describing a book about a narrator describing a book?
Lent it to a European friend of mine, who’s likely to be able to read all the multilingual asides off the top of her head, and never had it back. Probably still in her house somewhere. Got my stitched copy of Fifty Year Sword upstairs, though - MZD does love a haunted house story.
I haven’t read this in maybe 15 years, but I remember enjoying it for what it was. It didn’t really strike me as horror, and I remember it feeling very disjointed, which is probably one of the feelings it was trying to elicit?
Anyway, it’s worth checking out. Be prepared for lots of footnotes, addenda, and turning of pages.
I’m actually hoping to read this soon. I started it at one point, but I was also in school, and I just couldn’t follow it atm. But now I’ve finished, I’m in the middle of moving, my boyfriend starts up school again, so I’ll have extra time for reading. It wasn’t the scariest book I’ve read, but once I got into the flow of reading it with how it’s written, I was really enjoying it.
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I really enjoyed it as a literary work. I agree that it might not be what you are after if you’re looking for straight up horror. There are unsettling parts, but I think the parallel stories are the most interesting. Kind of a descent into madness along two plot lines. I recommend it to folks that read a bunch just as a unique experience. Haven’t come across anything else quite like it.
Who would even notice 1 inch difference?
Not much length, but a great deal of diameter.
Can’t touch the back of s tuna can, but can touch all sides at once
