Books of 2025: HOUSE OF LEAVES by Mark Z. Danielewski.
A film-loving coworker at the used bookstore where I used to work became utterly obsessed with this book over the course of a month. We could check books out of inventory to our personal shelves, and he would read it an hour at a time on lunch, elbows on the table, head in his hands, staring down into the pages like he was falling into an abyss.
Reader, that's exactly what he was doing. Dear Ethan: I'm sorry it took me eight (8) years to get to this, you were right, it was incredible.
For those of you unfamiliar with HOL: it's a 736-page postmodern monstrosity, ostensibly about a young family moving into a fucked-up house, although it's more accurately three (overlapping, echoing, intertwining) stories in a trench coat (following, sure, that family, but also our frame narrator Johnny, who has a horrible time all around, and also also the dead author of this book that Johnny is piecing together from fragments he found in said dead man's apartment).
But actually it's about stories and storytelling, about translation and echoes, about obsession and spirals, about space and void and fathers and sons, about patterns and puzzles and labyrinths and trauma and madness.
The whole book lies to you about EVERYTHING. All of our narrators except the Editors are established as unreliable very early on, and I (a fool) thought I could trust the Editors until I noticed they were gaslighting me with "DNE" in the index lol (this book has an index)(the index lies)(this book also has multiple appendices)(the appendices are enlightening). Deeply I embodied the conspiracy board meme while I was reading this, and it was SUCH a horrifying, fun, enriching, puzzling experience. The layout and formatting are experimental and weird, which had me turning the book all kinds of directions trying to read text running off the page or into corners (the only pic I posted while reading was the mirrored text one, but you can find many examples online!).
While this was a slow, dense book to get into, it really picked up once we got into the action of The Navidson Record, and I proceeded to binge the rest of it in two Very Long™ sittings (eight and six hours, respectively). It haunted me while I wasn't reading it, and I fell into basically the same obsession trap that Narrator Johnny did. This is an outrageous, complicated, nuanced, layered, infinitely-interpretable book that you can spend as much or as little time on as you want, and you'll never run out of things to analyze. Danielewski is absofuckenlutely galaxy-brained for this, and I cannot remotely imagine how one would sit down to put this manuscript together as a writer.
Unfortunately, however, it's sitting at a solid four stars from me, for three major reasons: 1) I was deeply disappointed in how it treated female characters; 2) I thought the ending fizzled out (and not even like a falling flare at the end of its life, tied up with held-breath horror and dreadful anticipation, just. meh.); and 3) just a hair of gratuitousness regarding the pretension levels (I get that that's part of the Experience, but it shaded just slightly too far over for me in a couple spots).
I didn't love how all of our primary female characters (Pelafina, Karen, Thumper) were defined solely in relation to the primary male characters, and how limited they were in their roles (institutionalized mother, "wife"/mother, and hooker with a heart of gold, respectively). With how much depth and nuance and infinitely-finicky detail work made up the rest of this novel, it was a letdown to see these women squished into such tight narrative spaces, defined by their roles and...pretty much nothing else. Women were mothers or daughters or for sex (there was so much sex in this book holy shit), and that was it--We Are Here To Support The Men And Nothing More™. (Arguably, even the women Zampano recruited for help filled the "daughter" role, which. sigh. it's just so painfully heterosexual and patriarchal.)
Despite that irritation, this book absolutely did suck me in, and I absolutely neglected my real life and sleep to finish it because I Had To Know. A masterfully-constructed work, I could write essays and essays on this thing, I stand by my initial take of "TMA fans will like HOL and HOL fans will like TMA", it has so much to stay about storytelling and art and what it means to make meaning out of built things (from houses to films to books), the meta had me hollering by the end, and just....ugh. What a fucking trip. Recommended.
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