The Physics of Creepiness (A Review of Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves)

Here I have a good opportunity for to use Cannibal Holocaust as a literary reference. Danielewski’s eight-year-old experimental opus, House of Leaves, can be at times as daunting a read as his last name is to type out.

Published in 2000 (here and now we get a “remastered full-colored edition”), House of Leaves concerns a family that moves into a house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. The story-which really gets no more complex than that-is told through the narration of three different characters: Johnny Truant, a drug addicted intellectual attempting to make sense of a manuscript left behind by the deceased Zampano, who has created an account of a movie, The Navidson Record, which didn’t exist. The third character is a sexless, neutral “editor” who provides the footnotes of Zampano’s book. 

It would be difficult to review such a work without reviewing it piece by piece. Truant is more or less the main voice of HOL, and his first-person narration concerns the discovery of a book written about a documentary which was never made. Truant attempts to piece together the facts from the book in an attempt to uncover any truth it contains or any relevance to his drug addled sex-filled life. With Truant, Danielewski doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been done more effectively by more seasoned writers (here I think Palahniuk), and its hard to reconcile Truant’s “I’ll do anything to get fucked up” lifestyle with his sometimes pages long metaphysical musings. Certainly there are such people, but Danielewski doesn’t quite make the connection. Still, Truant is a likeable, believable presence, and serves to break the reader away from the more effective parts of the novel, namely, the novel-within-the-novel, The Navidson Record, written by the recently deceased Zampano, a blind shut-in.

With The Navidson Record, Danielewski has crafted an entire other novel, and the technical way in which its written is something fresh in the world of horror writing, but is a method that has been used by filmmakers for almost three decades. It would be difficult to imagine Danielewski not having been influenced by films like Cannibal Holocaust or The Blair Witch Project, in which the idea is that the viewer is witnessing something that actually happened. The Navidson Record is written like this. The Navidson Record is a documentary about a family that moves into a house in which the interior dimensions exceed the architectural exterior ones. It is about a house that defies physics. Here the writing style could still be considered first person, but the technical manner in which it is laid out on the page adds to the creepiness.

Where Danielewski succeeds is creating two different realities, the one Truant lives in, which we could call “ours”, and the one that Zampano writes about, which the reader could see as made up. By adding a layer on top of Zampano’s terrifying account of Navidson and his family, we get one more place to retreat to and tell ourselves it isn’t real, much like the professor who sees the students’ documentary in Cannibal Holocaust. Where Danielewski misses slightly-even though this is a largely experimental work-is the addition of footnotes, which are added to Zampano’s work by Truant and the editor. Some footnotes are informative and add much realism, while others are simply lists of names that go on for pages at a time. Even in experimental fiction (I believe) the text should progress the story, or add characterization you can’t necessarily get from other passages. But here, Danielewski-to his credit-is a completionist, and spares nothing (not even the reader’s eyes) to illustrate the slow madness of his protagonists.

Even with the minor gripes, this is the best horror novel to hit the shelves since The Shining. It is scary, engrossing, and the story of The Navidson Record sits firmly in your head at night. Danielewski hasn’t published anything since, but if he did, he could likely teach a few genre hacks (I’m talking to you two, that take up two walls in the bookstore horror section) a thing or two about creeping out a reader.

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