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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780375703768
ISBN number: 0375703764
Label: Pantheon
Manufacturer: Pantheon
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 709
Printing Date: March 07, 2000
Publishing house: Pantheon
Release Date: March 07, 2000
Sale Popularity Level: 3643
Studio: Pantheon
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Years ago, when House of Leaves was very first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.
Now, for the very first time, this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and newly added second and third appendices.
The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.
Amazon.com:
Had The Blair Witch Project been a book instead of a film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors of Blast at their most avant-garde, the result might have been something like House of Leaves. Mark Z. Danielewski's very first novel has a lot going on: notably the discovery of a pseudoacademic monograph called The Navidson Record, written by a blind man named Zampanò, about a nonexistent documentary film--which itself is about a photojournalist who finds a house that has supernatural, surreal qualities. (The inner dimensions, for example, are measurably larger than the outer ones.) In addition to this Russian-doll layering of narrators, Danielewski packs in poems, scientific lists, collages, Polaroids, appendices of fake correspondence and 'various quotes,' single lines of prose placed any which way on the page, crossed-out passages, and so on.
Now that we've reached the post-postmodern era, presumably there's nobody left who needs liberating from the strictures of conventional fiction. So apart from its narrative high jinks, what does House of Leaves have to offer? According to Johnny Truant, the tattoo-shop apprentice who discovers Zampanò's work, once you read The Navidson Record, For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how.
We'll have to take his word for it, however. As it's presented here, the description of the spooky film isn't continuous enough to have much scare power. Instead, we're pulled back into Johnny Truant's world through his footnotes, which he uses to discharge everything in his head, including the discovery of the manuscript, his encounters with people who knew Zampanò, and his own battles with drugs, sex, ennui, and a vague evil force. If The Navidson Record is a mad professor lecturing on the supernatural with rational-seeming conviction, Truant's footnotes are the manic student in the back of the auditorium, wigged out and furiously scribbling whoa-dude notes about life.
Despite his flaws, Truant is an appealingly earnest amateur editor--finding translators, tracking down sources, pointing out incongruities. Danielewski takes an academic's--or ex-academic's--glee in footnotes (the similarity to David Foster Wallace is almost too obvious to mention), as well as other bogus ivory-tower trappings such as interviews with celebrity scholars like Camille Paglia and Harold Bloom. And he stuffs highbrow and pop-culture references (and parodies) into the novel with the enthusiasm of an anarchist filling a pipe bomb with bits of junk metal. House of Leaves may not be the prettiest or most coherent collection, but if you're trying to blow stuff up, who cares? --John Ponyicsanyi
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Rated by buyers 
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In brief: this book's structure is totally derivative of Kenneth Patchen's "Sleepers Awake" and "Journal of Albion Moonlight." It is as compelling as Stephen King in the sense that it is a satisfactory horror novel and there is a bit more depth to it than what one would expect from the genre. What annoyed me the most about the book wasn't the actual story or storytelling, but the length and the fact that a lot of people seemed to think that his surrealist construction of the book was in some way original.
Rated by buyers -
I picked this up without hearing any reviews of it. It was interesting but I quickly realized that Johnny was not an interesting character. I did like the story about the house, but it was layered in so much other fluff that you definitely lost the continuity of horror that should have been there.
By the end I was exhausted and sick of the story. The pacing felt sonorous and I was skipping or skimming huge chunks just to get to the subsequent section.
The post-modern stuff worked in some places, but I had a hard time seeing what the significance of its use was in several places. Done properly it should have contributed to the sense of disjointedness and horror, but it was so prevalent in the text that it lost much of its umph.
Still I'd recommend it if you're looking for some interesting reading.
Rated by buyers 
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House of Leaves is, arguably, Danielewski's greatest and most defining work to date. It is hard to sum up what HoL (as it is known to many fans) is, but it is most definitely not the typical book.
The premise of Danielewski's work is that a young man, Johnny Truant, finds an unpublished manuscript analyzing a film, that does not exist, about a house which exhibits preternatural phenomena. But that is about where the concrete facts of the work end, and even those facts are up for debate. Danielewski structured his work, and characters, in such a way that readers now theorize that Johnny was a child from the nonexistent film, that Johnny's mother was actually the man whom he recovered the manuscript from, that the house was actually a being that made the story up, and a whole host of other ideas that will not make sense until you read the work.
Though this work is unconventional and very long it is quite worth the investment of time and money. It goes places where few works are able to go and exists almost in its own genre. Many describe this work as a horror, yet it does not fit the typical requirements for a horror novel. It is, most definitely horrifying though, and many readers have experienced minor obsessions and strange feelings (such as unease in the dark, finding references to the book in day-to-day life, and nightmares) while reading the book; it is this which makes the book fall within the horror genre. Yet the book has also inspired many people, such as one user of the fan forum who based her PhD thesis on Danielewski's works.
When it comes down to it, I strongly recommend this book. Though it may, at times, be uncomfortable to read, it also brings forward thoughts and fears, it can begin a revealing process of self-analysis and understanding; but most importantly it can, and will, change you, and so few books can claim that.
Rated by buyers -
I heard a lot of people declare this book the scariest thing they'd ever read, and as a fan of horror - particularly of evil architecture - I was interested. I was sort of surprised to find that to me, anyway, this novel read a lot more like a moderately amusing, if quite tedious at times, satire on the academic ivory tower.
I think this book has the skeleton of a really terrifying horror story; I'd love to see The Navidson Record or read a novelization of it. Even so, given the way House of Leaves is written, I can't see it as scary in the least. I was an English major for far too many years and actually quite enjoy reading analytical articles, but it's not the same as reading the actual work. I know a lot of people who think The Haunting of Hill House is frightening, but I've never heard of anyone who woke up in a cold sweat because they read a critical analysis of the story. I think the essence of horror is getting the reader so engrossed in the story that they forget it's a story at all, but House of Leaves goes to great lengths to ensure that you never get drawn into the action for too long at a time; every time the summary of The Navidson Record starts to build up tension, it ends up getting diffused by a digression into the mythology of echoes and an analysis of their use in the story or some such thing. Even when Zampano, the writer, doesn't interrupt the flow, the editor Johnny will see fit to insert a 2-3 page footnote about his paranoia and nightmares and graphic sexual encounters. While Johnny's story was probably intended to be unnerving as well, I found it extremely repetitive and rarely effective. On top of everything else, we are told right off the bat that The Navidson Record doesn't actually exist (and even if it did, the blind Zampano couldn't have seen it anyway) and are reminded of this several times throughout the story.
At very first House of Leaves got on my nerves because I felt it was trying entirely too hard; it's difficult to take a book seriously when it's doing the equivalent of jumping up and down, flapping its covers and shouting "Look at me! See how postmodern I am? Watch me deconstruct myself!" Eventually, though, I realized that it worked beautifully as satire on the academic world - given that The Navidson Record does not actually exist within the novel, we can see that Zampano didn't even bother to write his story; he evidently felt that analyzing a work was more important than actually producing it in the very first place. The painstakingly cited references are all made up to suit the writer's convenience, as are the quotes themselves; difficult passages tend to be conveniently lost. The editor is hardly qualified for the job; in fact, he's frequently high and has a tendency to take Zampano's work and subvert it into his own autobiographical ramblings. Then, of course, there's the fact that this is obviously the type of novel to get a lot of scholarship; Danielewski has it set up so that actual academics will be writing actual articles about an article with a made-up premise and forged references. All these potshots at academia are actually really funny when you think about it, and it made the whole thing click for me fairly well. There are still parts that go on too long, and I could have done without the last hundred pages (aside from maybe the letters from Johnny's mother), but the work felt much more cohesive and much more enjoyable from that perspective.
I still think House of Leaves is a fairly impressive example of postmodern incoherency, but like most entries in the genre, it certainly lends itself to interpretation if you care to do so. The Navidson Record events are some of the most wonderfully evocative horror sequences I've read in a very long time, and like I said, if it were a separate work, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. I'm content to just borrow House of Leaves.
Rated by buyers -
Great book still haven't finished yet, but love it so far. A few bands I listen to wrote songs about this book so I had to pick it up to see what it was all about. It's very different from the way it is written and may get confusing at very first but once you understand who is who it's a great book.
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