House of Leaves

This is not for you.

I bought my first copy of House of Leaves in 2005, twenty-five and heavily pregnant with my second child and entirely unaware of what I was getting myself into, with regards to the book at least. I spent my last trimester poring over it, pouring myself into it, scribbling notes in the margins, sourcing works referenced in the footnotes, reading those, coming back to HoL, reading that footnote with new eyes, writing out my theories, plotting connections, drawing labyrinths, dreaming of Johnny and sunken ships and sweeping hands and Sarawak.

HoL changed my life. It changed me. It changed how I think, how I write, the media I consume, my art. I've never read anything like it, before or since, and for a long time I struggled to read any other fiction because nothing lived up to it. ‘I only read non-fiction,' I declared to my now husband when we met in 2011. He thought it was a bit weird but he went with it, thankfully. From 2005 to 2015 I read HoL at least once a year, usually twice, sometimes more, my pencilled marginalia smearing beneath my fingers as I expanded and clarified my often prolix - your word - notes. In 2015, lured by the pull of BookTube, I decided it was time to make a conscious effort to get back to reading fiction. I put HoL down and didn't pick it back up again for a long time. I'd quit smoking the year before, a twenty a day habit. Quitting HoL was a hundred times more difficult.

Hic labor ille domus et inextricabilis error. 1
–p107

I dabbled, of course. It haunted me. Rarely a day goes by went by that I didn't think about it, some small part of it. I picked it up here and there, read a few pages at random, maybe looked up a line that was nagging at me, checked a footnote or two. When my eldest showed an interest in reading it, we puzzled through the first few chapters together. But I didn't commit to doing a proper read-through again until last month when I turned forty three. Call it a birthday present.

Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is a compelling work of post-modern, ergodic lit, narrated by four characters who exhibit varying degrees of reliability. The text is almost a character in its own right, expanding and contracting as the story progresses, shifting and dancing through the pages, demanding that you rearrange your body to accommodate it. It's about a film by photojournalist Will Navidson, which documents his family's experience of living in a house that's bigger on the inside than on the outside, and what happens when he decides to explore it. Except it isn't.

House of Leaves is a complex academic study of the aforementioned film by an elderly blind man, littered with footnotes and peppered with references to other works that may or may not exist. Except it isn't.

House of Leaves is the story of Johnny Truant and how his life progresses after his discovery of the aforementioned academic study, told entirely in the footnotes of the main text of the book. Except it isn't.

House of Leaves is the epistolary story of Johnny's mother, who was committed to a mental institution after she tried to strangle Johnny when he was a child. Except it isn't.

House of Leaves is none of these things and all of them at once. It's an endless, impossible labyrinth of a book, and if you don't keep your wits about you it will trap you inside its ashen walls.

The idea of a house built expressly so that people will become lost in it may be stranger than the idea of a man with the head of a bull, and yet the two ideas may reinforce one another.
–Jorge Luis Borges

Returning to HoL after seven years with fresh eyes and a better brain was a joy. It was almost a clean slate. There were parts of the text I had completely forgotten about, and it was like reading them for the first time. Sections that had made no sense to me in the past were suddenly clear. I could follow references that I hadn't understood before. I was making connections between disparate parts of the narrative that I'd previously had no idea existed. But the thing about HoL is that it can be tricksy, and the older I get, the more simplicity I crave.

“Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.'”
–p34

All the puzzles and riddles, the winding, convoluted narrative paths, the whorls and loops of footnotes that ensnare you when you least expect it, the cross-referencing, the looking up quotes, the knowledge you're forced to assimilate in order to move through it all, all of that is a distraction from what lies at the heart of this book: not a Minotaur, but a beating heart. House of Leaves is a story about love, obfuscated by detail, and it's beautiful.

Maze treaders, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted and fragmented, suffer confusion, whereas maze viewers who see the pattern whole, from above or in a diagram, are dazzled by its complex artistry. 2
–p113

I once read an interview with Mark Danielewski in Flak magazine. “I don't consider myself a horror writer,” he says. “(Though) I think anyone that deals with big questions could be defined as a horror writer. If you're Melville, if you're Hawthorne, if you're Emily Dickinson. If you're Nietzsche. And I name those names not to put myself in their company — I'm just saying that you can pick a diverse range of writers who, if they really approach the deeper questions are ultimately going to unveil something that's terrifying.

“I had one woman come up to me in a bookstore and say, ‘You know, everyone told me it was a horror book but when I finished it, I realised that it was a love story.' And she's absolutely right.” he explains.

I never understood that until now. Perhaps I wasn't meant to.

Why did god create a dual universe? So he might say, “Be not like me. I am alone.”And it might be heard.
–p45

So this is it. I'm writing this because after seventeen years, and for the first time, I feel like I've finished the book. Will I ever read it again? I expect so, but the near constant nagging urge to just pick it up has left me, and I'm sure that if I were to hear The Song of Quesada and Molino today, I'd be able to sing along.

I've done it. I've finally found my way out of the labyrinth.

Known sum call is air am. I'm free.


[1] Here is the toil of that house, and the inextricable wandering. –Virgil, The Aeneid
[2] From The Idea of the Labyrinth: From Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages, by Penelope Reed Doob