Looking Back at Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves

The epistolary novel is infamous for being dense and full of symbolism.

The cover of House of Leaves is black and white with perpendicular lines running through it

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.