House of Leaves (stylized with "House" in blue) is the debut novel by American author Mark Z. Danielewski, published in March 2000 by Pantheon Books. A bestseller, it has been translated into a number of languages, and is followed by a companion piece, The Whalestoe Letters.
The novel is written as a work of epistolary fiction and metafiction focusing on a fictional documentary film titled The Navidson Record, presented as a story within a story discussed in a handwritten monograph recovered by the primary narrator, Johnny Truant. The narrative makes heavy use of multiperspectivity as Truant's footnotes chronicle his efforts to transcribe the manuscript, which itself reveals The Navidson Records supposed narrative through transcriptions and analysis depicting a story of a family who discovers a larger-on-the-inside labyrinth in their house.
House of Leaves maintains an academic publishing format with exhibits, appendices, and an index; as well as numerous footnotes including citations from the original author for nonexistent works, interjections and personal anecdotes from the narrator, and notes from the editors to whom he supposedly sent the work for publication. It is also distinguished by convoluted page layouts: some pages contain only a few words or lines of text, arranged to mirror the events in the story. At points, the book must be rotated to be read, making it a prime example of ergodic literature.
The book is most often described as a horror story, though the author has also endorsed readers' interpretation of it as a love story.Danielewski expands on this point in an interview: "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 realized that it was a love story.' And she's absolutely right. In some ways, genre is a marketing tool." . House of Leaves has also been described as an encyclopedic novel, or conversely a satire of academia..
Background Danielewski dates the origin of the novel 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.
Summary
House of Leaves takes the form of an academic text written by the recently deceased blind academic Zampanò that covers The Navidson Record, a documentary film which supposedly became an American cultural phenomenon upon its theatrical release in 1993. The manuscript has been edited by Johnny Truant, an apprentice at a tattoo parlor in Los Angeles who claims to have found the book in unfinished form after Zampanò's death and has submitted it for posthumous publication in 1998, despite claiming to have never met Zampanò. Truant interjects the book with footnotes ranging from fact-checks and sources to seemingly irrelevant personal anecdotes; a group of professional editors who, in turn, claim to have never met Truant, have further proofread and edited the book.
Zampanò's text claims that The Navidson Record has generated interest from both academia and popular culture, citing and quoting academic journals, journalists, and pop interviews alike. Zampanò narrates and describes the film in detail, but also segues into topics such as photography, architecture, Biblical studies, and radiometric dating, detouring into his own seemingly unrelated tangents. Despite many of the cited sources claiming The Navidson Record is a work of found-footage horror fiction, Zampanò is adamant that the film is an authentic documentary. Truant, however, claims The Navidson Record does not exist at all; he cites findings that Navidson is a fictionalization of the real-life photojournalist Kevin Carter, and finds that Zampanò has either copied secondary sources or made them up entirely to hide his own inexpertise in various subjects.
Truant acts as an unreliable narrator himself, as he is inexperienced in many of the topics discussed and admits to changing or deleting parts of Zampanò's work; many footnotes, supplemental sources, pages, and blocks of text are also missing, supposedly destroyed by Zampanò, Truant, or someone else. The editors include an appendix to the book that contains several writings from both Zampanò and Truant excluded from the body of the book, an obituary for Truant's birth father, and a series of letters from Truant's mother Pelafina compiled in The Whalestoe Letters. A segment titled "Contrary Evidence", compiled by the editors themselves, contains evidence that supports The Navidson Records actual existence, with a series of derivative works depicting scenes and concepts from the film as well as what purports to be a single, bootleg frame from within the film itself.
The Navidson Record Zampanò's text narrates the lives of the Navidson family during the events depicted in The Navidson Record, filmed in April 1990 and supported by other sources describing events that were not part of the film. The family comprises photojournalist Will Navidson; his partner Karen Green, a former model; and their two children, Chad and Daisy. The film began as a simple autobiographical project after the Navidsons moved to a new home in Virginia and installed cameras throughout to capture their lives, but the footage instead captures the family's discovery that the house is somehow 1/4" larger on the inside than on the outside. Further, a dark hallway soon appears in the living room without warning or explanation.
After Navidson is briefly lost in the hallway, he is forbidden by Karen from entering the hallway again and hires a crew of professional explorers to investigate, who found a maze-like complex within it containing a spiral staircase which appeared to descend endlessly. In the maze, the explorers recorded footage of unlit, featureless corridors and rooms with smooth ash-gray walls, floors, and ceilings. The only sound in the maze was apparently an occasional low growling noise. The expeditions soon led to disaster when one member, Holloway, turned on the rest. After several ordeals, one explorer was killed and another rescued, but the house itself then transformed in a hostile fashion, killing Navidson's brother Tom and forcing the family to frantically escape.
Afterwards, Karen separated from Navidson, departing to New York City with their children. She became a filmmaker herself to cope with her separation and showed Navidson's footage to several well-known professionals, such as Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick, Douglas Hofstadter, Ken Burns, Harold Bloom, Camille Paglia, Hunter Thompson, Anne Rice, and Jacques Derrida. Meanwhile, Navidson took samples from the hallway to professional researchers, who found that some of them dated from a time before the earth itself.
Navidson's curiosity eventually got the best of him, and he returned to the house with his camera to explore the hallway, quickly becoming disoriented and lost and running out of supplies. He burned a book he had brought for light; the camera captures that the book is inexplicably titled House of Leaves. Meanwhile, Karen moved back into the house in hopes of finding Navidson, but the hallway was no longer there. When it finally appeared, she entered and found Navidson alive, but emaciated and maimed by frostbite and injury. Navidson and Karen safely exited the house and moved to Vermont, where they finally married.
Truant footnotes Parallel to the plot of the Record, Truant's footnotes (written in the Courier Font) document his descent into obsession, delusions, and paranoia as he compiles the manuscript. He recounts tales of sexual encounters, his lust for a tattooed dancer he calls Thumper, and his bar-hopping with his friend Lude. Truant begins to neglect all else as he finishes the manuscript, soon believing that a formless and shapeless monster referred to as a "minotaur" existed within Navidson's house and is spread by those who become obsessed with the story; he believes that this "minotaur" is what killed Zampanò and is now stalking him.
Eventually, Truant's entire life falls apart; Lude is killed in a drug-induced motorcycle crash, and Truant loses his job, runs out of money, and becomes homeless. After finishing the manuscript, he sets fire to it, but this event doesn't stop the book from existing; he is last heard from after seeing a live band in a bar who has written songs based on House of Leaves despite it supposedly having not been published, and sitting under a tree telling himself things are going to be all right.
Characters
Johnny Truant Johnny Truant serves a dual role, as primary editor of Zampanò's academic study of The Navidson Record and protagonist as revealed through footnotes and appendices.
In the beginning of the book, Truant appears to be a normal young man who happens upon a trunk full of notes left behind by the now-deceased Zampanò. As Truant begins to do the editing, he begins to lose his grip on reality, and his life begins to erode around him. He stops bathing, rarely eats, stops going to work, and distances himself from essentially everyone, all in pursuit of organizing the book into a finished work that, he hopes, will finally bring him peace.