Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves was first published in 2000. It's hard to believe that it’s been almost a quarter of a century since the epistolary novel first took the literary world by storm and even harder to accept that this was his debut novel.
A prime example of post-modern metafiction, House of Leaves has gained a bit of a reputation over the past couple decades for being dense and difficult to read. The book has earned that notoriety: This isn’t an easy beach read that you can zip through in two hours. Its text demands a reader's focus. Some of its unusual formatting will be familiar, such as appendices, bibliographies, and footnotes akin to what you’d find in a textbook or scholarly article. Less common is the way the book plays with layouts.
Sometimes, a page may only have a single word or sentence. Other times, you must rotate the book to keep reading. At moments, it even plays with spacing, making the text look cramped and chaotic. And, of course, there are the specific words consistently printed in blue, red, or violet—the reasons behind which remain a subject of debate and conjecture to this day. Even the typography itself changes from section to section, depending on the narrator.
Not helping matters is that House of Leaves falls into more than one genre and category. It’s an epistolary novel because it styles itself as a manuscript pieced together via notes, transcripts, letters, and photographs. It’s metafiction because it pretends to be an actual manuscript submitted for publication. In fact, despite Danielewski’s name appearing on the cover, the novel maintains this charade by listing the authors of the work as Zampano and Johnny Truant—two characters from the book—in the frontmatter. The narrative parts relating to The Navidson Record recognizably belong to horror while the framing chronicle involving Johnny piecing together the manuscript veer into territory more commonly found in literary fiction.
Despite these genre-crossing tendencies, House of Leaves doesn’t require a special reading approach. It simply asks for a reader’s undivided attention. The main, and perhaps most helpful, piece of advice to understanding the book is this: Read everything. This isn’t a novel where you can skim the descriptions or skip the footnotes. Partly because they might contain an important piece of information, and partly because the act of reading those things—no matter the format or orientation they may take—contributes to the experience of reading the book. And when it comes to House of Leaves, the experience of reading the book is as important as the story the book chronicles.
As for the book itself, House of Leaves tells a story within a story. The protagonist, Johnny Truant, discovers an unfinished manuscript by Zampano, a writer he has never met. For various reasons, Johnny decides to complete the manuscript and submit it for publication. That manuscript, as it were, makes up the book we know as House of Leaves. That’s why the novel is filled with annotations, footnotes, and editorializing. It’s meant to mimic the process of putting together a nonfiction text for publication.
As for the manuscript, it focuses on a documentary called The Navidson Record. Zampano argues that the film was a cultural phenomenon upon release. Johnny, however, asserts that the documentary never existed at all. Determining which is true rests with the reader, a task made trickier by the fact that the in-universe manuscript is missing pages and supplemental documents able to confirm either way.
Regardless of whether The Navidson Record actually existed in-universe or was a complete fabrication by Zampano, House of Leaves also tells the story of the purported documentary, and it may be a familiar one to horror aficionados. Acclaimed photojournalist Will Navidson moves to a Virginia house with his partner and their children. The Navidsons install cameras throughout the house, though not for creepy surveillance reasons. The family intends to use the footage to capture candid family moments.
Unfortunately, their life is thrown into chaos when doors begin appearing out of nowhere and lead into rooms that didn’t previously exist and whose cumulative measurements eclipse the external dimensions of the house. What follows is an exploration of their home, the discovery of maze-like structures contained within, and the ensuing madness that follows. And, through it all, an occasional growl can be heard coming from the maze.
In short, House of Leaves is three narratives linked together through the conceit of a manuscript: the story of Will and Karen exploring a house with internal dimensions that are bigger than its external ones; the story of Zampano writing a manuscript about a film that may or may not be true; and the story of Johnny completing a manuscript written by a man he never met.
Understanding House of Leaves requires seeing how these narratives tie together. For example, Will’s obsessed exploration of the house mirrors Johnny’s obsession with completing the manuscript. Or thematically, the existence of a maze within the Navidson house and the unseen monster that dwells within conjures the minotaur from Greco-Roman mythology. But instead of the outright horror the minotaur and maze promise, their presence in the book represents something else—namely the labyrinthine workings of the mind and the traps it may contain.
Much has changed since House of Leaves was first published. Will Navidson’s plan to install candid cameras around their house has less harmless connotations in an era of Ring cameras. Today, many readers consume books digitally via e-readers, tablets, or phones. But House of Leaves could never work as an ebook. It’s a reading experience meant for the physical book. Despite the changes that time has brought in terms of technology and reader expectations, the themes in House of Leaves persist. There is the horror genre staple of a family confronting an unseen threat in their house, and there is the timeless journey of a man seeking connection from an absent parent.
Regardless, the novel is one still worth reading today. It may require both effort and multiple readings, but the experience remains unique and unmatched.
And while you’re at it, try reading House of Leaves while listening to the album, Haunted by Poe, who is Mark Z. Danielewski’s sister. Many of the tracks reference House of Leaves—most especially because the album was a tribute to their father, who happened to be a filmmaker.
