House of Leaves

736 pages

English language

Published July 6, 2000 by Doubleday.

ISBN:
978-0-385-60310-2
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4 stars (101 reviews)

Nothing, in all it's entirety.

5 editions

Best known for an underused gimmick

4 stars

The typesetting stuff in House of Leaves is unique, clever, impressive from a technical standpoint, and certainly not like anything I had ever seen before. Unfortunately, it is often little more than a gimmick — some of the most striking and complex printing in the entire book is used for what amounts to filler, never used for anything with more depth than adding some visual flair to a linear text. That might be enough for some, but it was hard not to be disappointed after hearing so much about the the novel's legendary reputation.

I enjoyed the book. I enjoyed the academic/informational presentation of the main text, I enjoyed the house and the analysis surrounding it, and I enjoyed some of the narrative around Johnny Truant, even if I found his footnote interjections mostly tedious and annoying, particularly earlier into the novel. I don't think I would have enjoyed these …

Review of 'House of Leaves' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

I can't stop thinking about what a nightmare this book must have been to design and print. I'm not sure any book will ever give me the sort of awe and revulsion I felt seeing a sentence span across the spine over two pages. It's obscene.

I didn't know much about House of Leaves beyond it's infamous typography, so it was surprising to learn it's functionally a book equivalent to found footage horror. It trades documentary "authenticity" for dense citations and pervert French, but conceptually I find a lot of similarities (both are primarily interested in the mechanics of their medium and how our trust in those forms can be exploited). How successful HoL is depends mostly on your willingness to indulge its most excessive elements, following footnotes to smaller footnotes and spinning the book around like it's the world thickest centerfold.

HoL slots into a weird segment of media …

Review of 'House of leaves' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Wow this book. The layers upon layers, going Inception and Sixth Sense on you except better; though a little lull in the middle. The total mindfuck, the multiple truths at the same time and the deep sadness. Our inability to deal with space, and more importantly, our concept of time even if we project it into space, but when it comes down to it, just our inability to ever deal with what "an ending" means.

Review of 'House of Leaves' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

This is probably the strangest book I've ever read. One of those cult favourites where you'll either passionately love the book, or vehemently hate it. Everything depends upon how much are you willing to invest - when you have to read the words upside down or sometimes vertically, when there are pages after pages after pages of incomprehensible texts, when you lose control of story at every step of the way and wonder what's really happening, are the characters losing their minds or is it you - you have to remember that this is just a book. Nothing more, nothing less. Otherwise, you'll end up like me, obsessing over every tiny detail, wondering at midnight whether the emptiness and coldness you feel is just because the temperature is low or are there other factors in play.

I know. I sound paranoid. But this is exactly what the author intended.

On …

Review of "Mark Z. Danielewski's House of leaves" on Goodreads

4 stars

1) "This is not for you."

2) "A little while later, when we said goodnight, Thumper gave me a big, sweet hug. Almost as if to say she knew where I'd just been.
'You're alright Johnny,' she said for the second time that night. 'Don't worry so much. You're still young. You'll be fine.'
And then as she put her jeep into gear, she smiled: 'Come down and see me at work some time. If you want my opinion, you just need to get out of the house.'"

3) "Can Navidson's house exist without the experience of itself?"

4) "Audrie, however, claims Karen only flirted and her indiscretions never went further than a coy drink or a curt meal. She maintains that Karen never slept with any of them. They were just a means to escape the closeness of any relationship, particularly the one with the man she loved …

Review of 'House of Leaves' on 'GoodReads'

5 stars

A wonderful labyrinthine multitude of stories and pathways that reads more like an artwork than a book[1]. The sheer level of investment into writing what is essentially nothing at all is a fascinating experiment and has produced a monumental book.

[1] Also a psychological thriller, honed by the relationship to the abyss and the maze, and the crass notes of one Mr. Johnny Truant

Review of 'House of Leaves' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This is amazing. There are two narratives here, the book itself and another, squeezed haphazardly in the footnotes. I felt torn between the two narratives the whole way, impatient with the one as I was waiting to get back to the other.

The first one is by a man known as Zampanò, whose prose is exquisitely Lovecraftian. Speaking as someone who's actually reading Lovecraft at the same time, I'll say that this echoes those of his works which are most disturbing. And I mean that in the best way possible.

In between and among Zampanò's book is the other narrator, Johhnny Truant (the one who ostensibly "found" Zampanò's work), whose words are just... beautiful. Well, I say "beautiful." Mostly I mean the language is fascinating, even if what the words mean is anything but beautiful. It is a masterpiece of... not quite stream of consciousness, but nearly. Wandering, barely-connecting thoughts, …

Review of 'House of Leaves' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I was disappointed in this book. It started so promisingly; here was a spooky story written in a challenging way. We had two narrators, one dead, one so unreliable that you begin to question everything he says. Getting lost in the labyrinth along with the characters was genius. Then you begin to realize this story is going nowhere. Just twist and turns, but nothing is behind the door only more doors and empty hallways. I felt the character development was weak, the whole Johnny Truant story got tedious. The house was never explained, getting lost in it could have been really chilling (ha) with the growl and endless twists and turns and changes and impenetrable darkness. The psychological aspect could have been elaborated but it was just kind of left to fizzle.

Meh, I really wanted to like this but ultimately I felt let down. It could have been so …

Review of 'House of Leaves' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

---------------------------
Review of House of Leaves

One word: beautiful.

Elaboration: The kind of beauty that is more pronounced since you see it surrounded by so much sadness and misery. The beauty for example of a pure-white lily, growing amidst the brown loam of a graveyard, or to invoke a more buddhist image, that of a lotus flower emerging pure white from the bottom muck and mud of a pond.

Specifics: The story is about a weird house and the family who moves there. The father is a world-famous photographer, a veteran of the warzones, more than a bit high-strung. There is his wife who is the love of his life, the mother his two children (a boy and a girl), a former model. The main story of the novel explores the unusual and supernatural things that happen to them and to those connected with them as they live in that …

Review of 'House of Leaves' on 'Storygraph'

2 stars

It'd be interesting to see what this book would look like if someone were to take the Navidson parts and put them together in the fashion of a regular narrative. I think it would hold up well, if not be even better than the disjointed, experimental, Pale Fire-meets-DFW style of the novel. While there are portions of the book that are totally engaging (like some of Truant's stories or when the explorers first enter the mystery room/corridor), the structure of the book (by which I mean the way the story is actually printed on the page) breaks up the story to a point where the novel gets really annoying, especially the pages only partially printed or printed at strange angles.

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