Whenever anyone asks me for a recommendation on a book, I give them House of Leaves. As a fan of experimental novels, nervous tension, lingering dread, beautiful and sometimes baffling prose, and reading as a physical experience, this book ticks all my boxes.

I seldom read a book more than once, but I’ve read House of Leaves several times. It’s constructed and printed such that it’s like reading a different book every time. Not a different story, but a different telling of the same story. Reading it the second time was a bit like overhearing the same conversation from the other side of the room, if that makes any sense.

It’s a great book. It’s inventive, challenging, and beautifully terrifying. In movies, they talk about elevated horror. This is an elevated haunted house book in all the right ways.