Mark Z. Danielewski (; born March 5, 1966) is an American fiction author. He is most widely known for his debut novel House of Leaves (2000), which won the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. His second novel, Only Revolutions (2006), was nominated for the National Book Award.
Danielewski began work on a 27-volume series, The Familiar, although he completed only five volumes before halting the project in 2017.
Danielewski's work is characterized by an intricate, multi-layered typographical variation, or page layout, which he refers to as "signiconic". Sometimes known as visual writing, the typographical variation corresponds directly, at any given narratological point in time, to the physical space of the events in the fictional world as well as the physical space of the page and the reader. Early on, critics characterized his writing as being ergodic literature, and Danielewski has described his style as:Signiconic = sign + icon. Rather than engage those textual faculties of the mind remediating the pictorial or those visual faculties remediating language, the signiconic simultaneously engages both in order to lessen the significance of both and therefore achieve a third perception no longer dependent on sign and image for remediating a world in which the mind plays no part."
Personal life Danielewski was born in New York City to Tad Danielewski, a Polish avant-garde film director, and Priscilla Decatur Machold. Mark was Tad's second child and his first with Priscilla; Mark's sister Anne, also known as Poe, was born two years later. The Danielewski family moved continuously for Tad's various film projects, and by the age of 10, Mark had lived in six countries: Ghana, India, Spain, Switzerland, Britain and the United States. When he was 10 years old, the family settled in Provo, Utah, where he and his sister were brought up. Danielewski has said his family's frequent relocations in his early years helped him appreciate creativity in all its forms and showed him that "there was much to be learned out there."
In 1985 Danielewski, aged 19, visited his half-brother, who was living on Rue des Belles Feuilles in Paris. Here, he began writing on a manual typewriter and enjoying the actual process of writing for the first time. During this period he wrote a story called "Where Tigers Dance", which he has called "so unfinished it didn't deserve to be called incomplete", but has said that it continued "to roam around" in his imagination.
In 1988 Danielewski graduated from Yale with a degree in English literature; he had studied under John Hollander, Stuart Moulthrop, and John Guillory. He was also inspired by Harold Bloom. In 1989 he moved to Berkeley, California, where he enrolled in an intensive Latin course at the University of California, Berkeley. He then pursued graduate studies at the USC School of Cinema-Television in Los Angeles. During this time he became involved with Derrida, a documentary about the career and philosophy of Algerian-born French literary critic and philosopher Jacques Derrida. Danielewski was an assistant editor, sound technician and cameraman,Derrida. Dir. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman. Perf. Jacques Derrida. Zeitgeist, 2002. and can be seen adjusting the sound equipment in Derrida's suit jacket at one point in the film. He graduated with an MFA in 1993, the year his father died. It was also the year he had the idea of a house bigger on the inside than the outside, an image which would become his first novel, House of Leaves.
Danielewski has been a cat lover throughout his life. Cats show up in myriad ways throughout his works and are a main topic in his series The Familiar. In January 2016,They're here (cat adoption). Facebook. 9 January 2016. Danielewski adopted two Devon Rex kittens, Archimedes and Meifumado,Archimedes & Meifumado. Facebook. 9 February 2016. after his previous Devon Rex companions, SibylMark Z. Danielewski on his new cat-centric book project. io9. 23 September 2010. and CarlWhere I Like to Read. Huffington Post. 18 December 2012. died.
Career
House of Leaves Danielewski dates the origin of his debut novel House of Leaves to 1990 and a story that he wrote after finding out that his father was dying:
1990. My father was head of the USC School of Theater. I was living in New York. Then I got the phone call. The 'Mark your father is dying' phone call. He was in the hospital. Renal failure, cancer. I got on a Greyhound bus and headed west. Over the course of three sleepless nights and three sleepless days I wrote a 100+ page piece entitled Redwood. I remember using a fountain pen. I barely had the change to buy sodas and snacks along the way and there I am scratching out words with this absurdly expensive thing of polished resin and gold. I'd like to say it was a Pelikan, but I don't think that's correct. Another thing I seem to remember: the paper I was writing on had a pale blue cast to it. There was also something about how the pen seemed to bite into the paper at the same time as it produced these lush sweeps of ink. A kind of cutting and spilling. Almost as if a page could bleed. My intention had been to present this piece of writing as a gift to my father. As has been mentioned many times before, my father responded with the suggestions that I pursue a career at the post office. I responded by reducing the manuscript to confetti, going so far as to throw myself a pity parade in a nearby dumpster. My sister responded by returning later to that dumpster, rescuing the confetti, and taping it all back together.
Writing House of Leaves took ten years, and between 1993 and 1999, Danielewski made a living as a tutor, barista, and plumber. He eventually found a literary agent in Warren Frazier, who, according to Danielewski, "fell in love with it." They went to roughly thirty-two publishers before Edward Kastenmeier from Pantheon decided to take on the project. Small sections of the book were downloadable off the internet before the release of the first edition, and it is said that these sections "circulated through the underbellies of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and San Francisco, through strip clubs and recording studios, long before publication"though very few were able to experience the book this way initially.
The first edition hardback, which featured special signed inserts, was released on February 29, 2000, and Pantheon released the hardback and paperback editions simultaneously on March 7, 2000. The novel went on to win the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award and gain a considerable cult following. House of Leaves has been translated into numerous languages, including Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, and Turkish. It has been taught in universities.
A 2013 New York Times article featured a conversation between Stephen King and his son, Joe Hill, and made reference to the novel:
Joe and Stephen were having another typical conversation: hashing out what novel could be considered the Moby-Dick of horror. 'That one with all the footnotes, they argued – no, not that one, the other one: Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves.'
On June 18, 2018, Danielewski released a TV pilot script for the novel in the House of Leaves book club on Facebook.
House of Leaves has been considered an example of the genre of postmodern horror in literature. A review of House of Leaves by Jousha Simpson of The Writing Post stated that House of Leaves is a complex postmodern horror novel that is able to successfully use the unreliable narrator trope. The cultural impact that House of Leaves has since its release has been the subject of many articles. An article titled Liminal Scares: How 'House of Leaves' Has Redefined Modern Horror by Luiz H.C from the horror news site Bloody Disgusting mentions that the concepts are ideas of horror that are used in House of Leaves have gone on to not only inspire other books but also movies, video games, and internet horror stories. Games such as Alan Wake and Control, released by game studio Remedy Entertainment, have sequences and concepts that are inspired by House of Leaves with Alan Wake having a sequence that references the novel. The most recent example of the impact that House of Leaves has had is the Doom II mod MyHouse.wad. Posted to the Doomworld Forums on March 3, 2023, by user Veddge, MyHouse.wad is a mod for Doom II that was posted under guise that it was a tribute map to the creator's friend. A review from the gaming journal website PC Gamer titled "Doom creator John Romero finally plays its most mind-blowing mod" by Harvey Randall mentions the video essay by YouTuber PowerPakGames, which not only goes into detail on the mod itself but mentions the references and inspirations that MyHouse.wad makes to House of Leaves.
Collaboration with Poe In 2000, Danielewski toured Borders locations across America with his sister Poe to promote his book and her album Haunted, which has many elements of House of Leaves. The album features Danielewski reading from House of Leaves on several tracks, as well as audio recordings that Tad Danielewski left for Mark and Poe, which they found after his death. In 2001, a remake of Poe's song "Hey Pretty (Drive-By 2001 Mix)," which featured Danielewski reading from House of Leaves, reached #13 on Billboard's Alternative Chart. That summer, Poe and Danielewski spent three months as the opening act for Depeche Mode's 2001 North American tour. On this tour, he played Madison Square Garden. He also composed the song "A Rose Is a Rose," which Poe sang on the Lounge-a-Palooza compilation album.
The Fifty Year Sword After the publication of House of Leaves, Danielewski worked on two projects in tandem: his second novel Only Revolutions, and a novella, The Fifty Year Sword, an "adult ghost story". Danielewski created the book itself with the Dutch artist Peter van Sambeek. The recto pages of the book are empty except for page numbers and van Sambeek's art. The Dutch publishing house De Bezige Bij published 1000 first editions on October 31, 2005, and 1000 second editions on October 31, 2006. Little is actually known about the inspiration for the story, or the exact time period during which it was written.
Pantheon edition and theatrical collaborations In 2010, Danielewski announced that he would do stage performances of The Fifty Year Sword, the first of which were on October 31, 2010, at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in Los Angeles. There were two back-to-back sold-out performances that night. The production featured music, five people reading the words of the five speakers in the novella (including Betsy Brandt, who played Marie Schrader on Breaking Bad), and shadow casting by Christine Marie.Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: On October 31, 2011, Danielewski produced a slightly modified production back to back at REDCAT again. There was live music by Partch Ensemble percussionists Matthew Cook and T.J. Troy, as well as Christine Marie's shadow casting and five actors reading. The two performances were again sold out.