House of Leaves

by Mark Z. Danielewski

736 pages

English language

Published July 6, 2000 by Doubleday.

ISBN:: 978-0-385-60310-2

View on OpenLibrary

(123 reviews)

Nothing, in all it's entirety.

6 editions

Sandra reviewed House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

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 …

rufzerg666 reviewed House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Review of 'House of Leaves' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

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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 house.

What is great about this is that the narration is unique. The narrator is unreliable, as he is an obsessed drug user. The framing is this: so this old guy dies, and in his apartment is found all these notes which turns out to be a book in progress. The narrator somehow becomes interested in how the pieces of the story unfolds and he takes it as his task to edit the notes into a book. The notes that the old man wrote becomes the main storyline of the novel. The narrator himself becomes an important part of the novel. Besides this, the actual text of the novel is presented in a dizzying manner. There are pages that only contain a few words. There are pages that are filled with just footnotes. The footnotes, my god, the footnotes, they are everywhere in this novel.

Conclusion: if you want something deep, something that you will be obsessed with, something that will keep you awake nights just so you can read some more of it, then this book is for you. reading the book is an unforgettable experience. so much so that upon finishing it, you would take the time to ponder and just let all the emotions sink in.

Dec 15, '11 10:49 AM
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Grey reviewed House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Review of 'House of Leaves' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Warning: this text may contain spoilers This completely consumed me. Never have I read something so intricate and brilliant. It could be taken in so many ways, but for me, it was the evidence of a personal descent into madness as a result of love and devotion; the house being the projected physical medium for the fathomless psyche of both love and madness. They are not things to be harnessed or controlled, they simply are.

scifijack reviewed House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Review of 'House of Leaves' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Trippy, chilling and enthralling.

Shawn Towner reviewed House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

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.

nekokat reviewed House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Review of 'House of Leaves' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

I almost walked away from this book after the first hundred pages. Describing it as pretentious is akin to calling the Atlantic Ocean slightly damp. It's self-indulgent, painfully clever, and unrelentingly experimental -- enough to make you wish he'd stop experimenting for a second and just tell a freaking story. It's so full of post-modern wankery that you wonder what you, as a reader, have to do with it at all: one gets the impression the author expects readers to sort of admire it from afar instead of actually attempting to read it.

It has its oddly compelling moments, but on the whole it's about as exciting as reading a textbook for a post-modern film crit class. The author expects a LOT of effort on the part of the reader, while consistently failing to provide much of a return on that investment.

That having been said, I have to admit …