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Emotionally harrowing, tonally bleak, relentlessly obscene, Cockatiel x Chameleon is a brutal book with much to say about many things. Creation, community, identity, purpose, meaning, politics, sex, depravity, and how all these things connect, all seen through the lens of dysfunctional and often sinister characters whose unusual minds cause them to chafe against normal, ordinary, polite society.

The book has a lot of distressing content. It crosses the line of what is socially acceptable without flinching. Cope with that, and you'll find the unique and evocative experiences of complex people with strange lives, penned in masterful prose and depicted with as much good taste as the content could possibly allow. I think it improves the experience if you have some familiarity with the internet's more debauched communities and the personalities found there, but by how much? It's hard to tell. It's a very "internet" story to me, but the internet I grew up with may be very different to the internet of someone growing up today.

The novel doesn't do a very good job fusing horror and comedy. Both exist in the book, but it feels more like there are designated horror segments and designated comedy/action segments that you whip between at the author's whim. The horror is quite evocative and enjoyable, but the bulk of the book is the action and the comedy, which is so bad it's insulting. It's not witty or clever, it's crass, violent, and gratuitously edgy, with penis and shit jokes and characters who say slurs and bad guys who punch everyone in the balls making up the bulk of the author's comedic repertoire.

If you enjoy that sort of stuff, you might find the book enjoyable. I certainly don't object to reading books with transgressive, strange, or potentially offensive material, but in this novel it feels like meaningless shock humour, edge for the sake of edge, serving no purpose other than to make you go "omg did he REALLY just say that?!?!?!?!" after the bad guy sings some pop song with the lyrics rewritten to be half racial slurs. It's an agonising read if the humour doesn't work for you, and it did not work for me at all.

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 elements any less if the book's strange typesetting was taken out entirely, though, which seems like a real missed opportunity.