1/10/2025 - House of Leaves Revew

Hello, this is my hopefully return to reviewing after being in a kind of mental haze for the last 2 or so weeks, This time on House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. 

House of leaves is a complicated thing to review, as its story is rife with meta commentary, told by an extremely unreliable narrator, and is also potentially non-linear in nature. I will do my best to provide a brief synopsis: House of leaves is about Truant, a bacchant (in spirit, doesn't actually follow the god) whom discovers an essay review of the movie "the Navision records" while exploring the apartment of a recently deceased old man. From there he sets about transcribing the manuscript interspersed with his own thoughts and life. Only one problem: no such movie seems to exist, and as he begins to transcribe the book... strange, perhaps evil, things begin to happen.

This book, despite my high enjoyment, is hard to recommend. This is due to how HARD the book is to read, it is not a casual read. The indexes at the end are needed for a complete picture of the story, there are times you'll be reading text upside down, turning the book around and around to read the text, and of course having to put together a story that is told almost entirely indirectly.
Example: 

 The actual contents of the book kept me reading the whole time, and you slowly begin to care much less about the Navision records and much more about truants story. There are a few times where the story slows down a little bit, and during those times it can be a bit of a slog. But this is few and far between, and for the most part this is a fantastically paced experience as long as you're willing to put in the work to read and decipher it. I will repeat though: the index is NOT optional, you have to read it to understand what is happening.

Overall I rate this book a 4.5/5

SPOILERS SECTION:

This, like all my reviews, has been written without any outside information of the book, no, thus all the ideas within this could go against common consensus, or even be wrong. I like to read outside opinions after I write my own down, as to not taint my initial thoughts.

in House of leaves I had just as good a time uncovering the story as I did reading it. Given this, I'd like to use this first part to simply tell what I think the story is, rather than describe what I did or didn't like about it:

In the beginning, we are essentially led to assume that Zampano may just be cursed. The scrawling manuscript, the half eaten cats, the deep gouges in the floor next to where he died (get to that later) even the nailed shut windows, these are not the actions of the average person. I assumed, at first, that the big reveal would be that Truant, and perhaps anyone that reads the records, are cursed some haunting unseen beast, ready to torment you into nailing your own windows shut and drive you mad. However, while it is possible that the manuscript has some supernatural properties, it seems more likely that Truant simply has an underlying psychosis that was triggered by his obsession with the records. This is of course supported by his mother, who clearly had periods of psychosis. Coming in and out of lucidity as she writes letters to Truant. This reality is slightly obscured by the fact that Truants writing remains considerably more lucid than his mothers, even in the depths of his psychosis during the second portion of the book. Overall, I believe this is a story of truants psychosis catching up with him, triggered by an obsession over a manuscript and a search for truth, and slow recovery during the end of the book. This is the core story, The story of the navidison records is important in the context of building horror, and to accent Truants recovery with that of the navidison family (maybe the house really does exist! maybe the hallway really is there, maybe truant isnt mad.) and to lead us astray from the truth.

With that said though, there are many things that this explanation cannot account for. Why WAS there big gashes on the ground next to zampanos corpse, why did he have books in the freezer, what made him go mad! and most of all: why was he writing about a movie that doesn't exist. He is the biggest mystery of the book, and one I don't really have a good explanation for. My best guess is that he too was likely caught up in some form of psychosis? or perhaps his blindness simply made him go about life differently. Maybe nailing the windows shut was an act that served only to keep a draft out, he couldn't see out them after all. Who knows, I don't, maybe a second read would do me good down the line.

So yeah, that's what I think the story is, now onto my thoughts on that story, mostly just misc/ uncategorized thoughts.

I REALLY like truant, I love how highly intelligent and well read he is, and how that contrasts his growing madness, sometimes even pushing it along, his comments near the beginning about how unreliable photos/videos are now with the advent of photo manipulation was super interesting (to say nothing of AI). His unreliable nature makes the whole book a mystery, and as I said before, I really liked putting the story together after the fact. Reading the last pages of the book of his journal, figuring out that they were all entirely out of order, and then rereading everything in order was a treat.

I also liked learning about this fake movie, while it wasn't, in my opinion, the main focus of the movie, watching the "monster" from the backrooms slowly bleed into Truants real life was cool. It almost felt like I had watched the movie by the end of it. I know there are deeper meanings to this part of the story but I truly had a hard time viewing them outside of the context of truants story, I don't know if this was intentional or not. To expound on this: I think that the Navision records are a parallel to truants mental state, the House is truant and he is the House.

I enjoyed the fact that the book had a "happy" ending for everyone, fake and real. While nobody came out unscathed, most people made it through. Except those who could not leave the past for a better future. Actually that may not be a good way to put it. Except those who... could not learn to grow as a person. Maybe that is the best way of putting it. Thinking of Lude and holloway here. 

I do want to talk briefly on the most enigmatic and confusing character of the book: the minotaur. This character is seemingly the "monster", both in the real world and in the manuscript. It is alluded that anyone who learns of this beast ends up going insane. It is also my only theory as to the giant scratches in the floor, if this monster is real, then it may be what killed Zampano, it may also be why he tried to conceal its presence from the manuscript, it may also have been hunting Truant for awhile before he "moved past" the house and escaped its clutches. 

There is obviously a lot I am yet to pickup on, this book is very meta, and I'm sure there are a lot of subplots that I am left unaware of, however I think I need to move on from this manuscript, lest the madness infects me too.

Thanks for reading.