In an attempt to assimilate the intended direction of my next novel, I wanted to dive into some unsettling thrillers. One of the two of which I uncovered off a surprise comment from a friend of mine.
“Currently trying to get through house of leaves.”
There was nothing more than that. Curious, I looked it up, read a tidbit of the Wikipedia introductory paragraph, and was left intrigued by its use of ‘altering text’ from normal conventions. As someone who studied unconventional alterations of text (shout-out to all my classes involving this study in FSU, especially visual rhetoric), I had to see for myself what this story entailed.
Now, Where To Even Begin…
House of Leaves is a modern gothic horror centered around mainly two perspectives: One, through the perspective of Johnny Truant who finds Zampano dead in the latter’s apartment unit and stumbles across his manuscript titled House of Leaves. House of Leaves is a dissection of a film titled The Navidson Record, and what soon becomes maddening is the realization of a lack of record anywhere regarding this film and several of its testimonials.
The second perspective is through the perspective of the Navidson Family, protagonists of The Navidson Record. Tom Navidson and his family move into a house on Ash Tree Lane, soon realizing that the house is taking shape of its own will. This pushes Navidson to uncover the mystery of the house’s innards, soon realizing the grandiose is far greater than ever anticipated.
It’s hard to decipher where to even begin with House of Leaves after fully reading through it. The book encompasses not only these two perspectives, but several footnotes citing different sources, Johnny going into tangents of his personal life slowly deteriorating, and appendixes that also include letters from Johnny’s insane mother. Hell, some of the sources are actually citations from books in our real world. Which leads to…
What is Truth, and What is Fiction?
In the beginning, Johnny himself denotes that he has quite the mind for deceiving and lying, implying that he is a veryunreliable narrator. Thus, throughout Johnny’s narrative, there comes a very hard line to decipher what exactly is Johnny telling the truth of and what is he exaggerating? And is he even aware of his exaggerations?
Although at a glance this type of narrative may seem as frustrating, I would defend that Johnny’s narrative is very addicting. There is something about his descriptive and run-off sentences that I’ll get into soon.
As I read through The Navidson Record, I was thrown into the madness of how much otherworldly essence this manuscript possessed, especially how much Johnny seemed to have been affected by it. From physically weakening to severe hallucinations, it remains even more of a mystery to the reader along with Johnny.
And his run-on sentences are described so dead-on to captivate the high-speed paranoia of panic attacks and anxiety that his own madness is ironically a form of beauty. Danielewski’s prose, especially Johnny’s sections, are remarkable.
The Unknown Magnified
The fear of the unknown is probably the most powerful form of the fear. Because it plays off our imagination, it is boundless, unkept by any sort of restriction, peering into the vast darkness that is symbolized literally within both sides of the story.
In The Navidson Record, the house eventually takes form to reveal a new hallway stretching 60 feet inside the house (the outside of the house remains the same in structure, which is even more eerie). Navidson and crew endure multiple expeditions to explore the inside of this structure, leading to THOUSANDS of miles of darkness all across. Along with not being able to see anything farther than the beams emitted from their flashlights, the house also changes its pattern sporadically. Simultaneously, a growl is emitted, but the source is never seen.
While the house can be seen as the creature, there is never a personification of the apparent creature terrorizing them. Even film critics merely guess at the apparent form of said being. And with Johnny slowly overcome by the story and its unknown origins, he is also left terrorized by some unknown being. Isolated in dark hallways other than his fortified house, there is the sound of some unearthly growl behind him. Along with the hallucinations of unfortunate demises, Johnny is left spiraling into his madness.
Unsettling, beyond the text
In description alone, this book is unsettling, but what pushes the boundary even more is two things: narrative layout and physical layout (bear with me as I’m somewhat improvising on the labeling for both of these)
The narrative layout is the flow of the story. Think of almost every other book out there. It reads from left to right, followed by a new section, left to right, and so forth (or right to left then new section). With Johnny protruding through the footnotes, there are several moments where the reader is forced to break away from the Navidson manuscript and divulge into Johnny’s ongoing life.
Once you hear of Johnny’s madness you bounce back into the Navidson storyline. But then comes another footnote from the editor of this book (Ironically named Ed), to go to Appendix # for more details. For full context, you bounce over to said Appendix, fully digesting the content to bounce back to the narrative. It is a pattern that becomes unsettling especially when you hit the climax of terror and are forced away via a footnote or an appendix section to grant yourself further context.
I think describing it alone is maddening, but even more so, you don’t have to read it that way. You can read the storyline, then Johnny’s narrative, and then the appendix sections. OR Johnny, Navidson then appendixes. Even in reverse!
The physical layout of the story mainly correlates with two sections of the story. Briefly, Johnny’s mother writes a few letters that deteriorate in structure. The letters lose their paragraph foundation and fall throughout the paper like an hourglass of sand. They also scatter around like gusts forming a tornado, only barely finding its meaning within it. In the content itself of these few letters, the mother has lost all grip with reality.
Within The Navidson Record, Danielewski (through the lens of Zampano) makes some interesting decisions. This isn’t seen until after 5 or 6 chapters, but the first indication becomes when the footnotes are warped around the main body of text, stretching over pages and pages on the bottom and sides, including a square block that’s meant, from what I assume, to mimic a post-it note.
Until later, when Navidson begins to enter in the latter half of the fourth text. We see the text becoming more separated. Now, only a line of text appears per page, sometimes upside down, sometimes rotated, ending off with bracket simples and a dark circle. All I can interpret is from the uncomfortable vast of darkness that stretches infinitely through the mysterious corridors and hallways.
In both essences, the physical layout becomes uncomfortable, disorienting, and as repetitive as it’s mentioned, maddening. The content of the text has literally bled into the physical text, implying a mental picture of the stories disturbing effect.
House of Layers (In Conclusion)
This story is layered from not only the above but in the subtext throughout the story. From the speculative prose to certain lines crossed out and quotes that have been signified, I feel that this blog only scratches the surface of the multiple meanings that can be interpreted from House of Leaves. For it to accrue all of this, plus the stitched together world that Danielewski has created through Zampano’s makeshift (?) documentary plus Johnny’s hallucinatory lens, House of Leaves is a masterpiece of gothic literature.
Have you read House of Leaves? And if so, what do you think? If not then based off this blog, what gothic tales does House of Leaves remind you of?
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