Anyone at Home?
House of Leaves at 25  

1,979 words

In early June of 1990, the Navidsons flew to Seattle for a wedding. When they returned, something in the house had changed. Though they had only been away for four days, the change was enormous. It was not, however, obvious—like for instance a fire, a robbery, or an act of vandalism. Quite the contrary, the horror was atypical.
-Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

I would rather not go
Back to the old house.
There’s too many bad memories.
-The Smiths, “Back to the Old House”

Cult books have a sort of freemasonry about them, and those who have read them greet one another with enthusiasm and a sense of being in possession of knowledge hidden from the uninitiated. Which books are cult books? At random, I would say Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints all fit the bill, but are read by different types of people. However, if these are cult books, they became so by finding their respective audiences after they were published. It is hard to think of a book which seems to have been intended as a cult book, with the possible exception of Mark Z. Danielewski’s oddly compelling 2000 debut novel, House of Leaves.

The novel tells three stories, each of which nestle within one another like a Russian babushka doll. The opener is a first-person narrative told by Johnny Truant, a wild-eyed, drug-addled LA wastrel who works at a tattoo parlor and falls in and out of bed with various equally deranged vixens of the Greater Los Angeles area. Johnny discovers an old manuscript – a staple of horror stories – in the apartment of a friend’s dead neighbor, Zampanô, and the secondary tale involves the old, blind, and now deceased writer. There has been something of a struggle in the dead man’s room, and what seem to be the claw-marks of some horrific creature have been gouged into the floor. This connects us with the central text, Zampanô’s manuscript, entitled The Navidson Record.

This is the story, a sort of macabre review, of a home movie, and is where this uneasy tale really begins, although the three entwined narratives lead in and out of one another like, as will become increasingly relevant, a labyrinth. Truant immerses himself in the chaotic MS, uncertain whether it is a hoax, a prank, or a terrible record of something not of this earth:

Zampanô’s entire project is about a film which doesn’t even exist. You can look, I have, but no matter how long you search you will never find The Navidson Record in theaters or video stores. Furthermore, most of what’s said by famous people has been made up. I tried contacting all of them.

On the subject of what is recorded in the manuscript, there will be critical interjections on The Navidson Record from critics real and invented.

The Navidson Record tells the story of Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist Will Navidson, along with his partner Karen and two children, as they move into a new house in Virginia. All is idyllic until Navidson measures the house, and finds that its external and internal dimensions differ. The house is a quarter of an inch larger measured on the inside than it is on the outside.

Navidson calls his brother, who joins the family to investigate, and then things radically change. A corridor appears between two of the rooms, and the house begins to shift and expand internally, although not externally. Filmed explorations are made – there will be five in the course of the book, two ending in fatalities – and Navidson’s skill as a film-maker extends to his portraiture of the family, along with the expanding team of investigators drawn to the house of leaves. This, then, is the strange premise of a strange novel, but it also accelerates the academic, cultural, and personal responses of the outside world as various pundits comment and write essays on the house, as portrayed in an account of a film that no one can prove exists outside the fevered imagination of a mad old blind man. As the explorers descend deep within the ever-expanding building, they are accompanied textually by clashing explanations of where they are and what it means: “I got some vertigo,” Jed confesses. “I had to step way back from the edge and sit down. That was a first for me.” Wax is more cavalier, claiming to have felt no fear, though for some reason he is more exhausted than the rest. Holloway remains the most stoic, keeping any doubts to himself, adding only that the experience is beyond the power of any Hi 8 or 35mm camera: “It’s impossible to photograph what we saw.” (97—Marjorie Preece uses this one line to launch into her powerfully observed essay ‘The Loss of Authority: Holloway’s Challenge’ Kaos Journal, v. 32, September, 1996, p. 44. Preece wonderfully shows how Holloway’s assertion that the camera is impotent within the house ‘helps establish him—at least for a little while—as the tribe’s head.’)

House of Leaves is experimental not just in the meaning of the text, but in its very textuality. As the explorers descend into the pitch black of the increasingly capacious depths of the house, so too the words on the page emulate their altered experience. The typography of the page expands and contracts with the topography of the house, the words paginated to resemble a ladder or a rope, or spiraling away as the staircases do, sometimes restricting type to one word to a page, leaving them stranded, or upside-down or printed sideways, surrounded by a liminal emptiness, like the explorers themselves.

This would not make a good audiobook for these typographical reasons. Indeed, Danielewski himself has forbade any adaptation of HOL, including film versions, and he has not been short of requests. There are many “fan-based” attempts at recreating the explorations of the house, but the author has stood firm against any big-screen spectaculars. House of Leaves was written as, and shall remain, very much a book.

One of the sub-plots in a book composed of sub-plots is Navidson’s (literal) descent into madness, and the effect of the house on those who experience it is different, seeming to amplify and distort their various character traits. This, of course, provokes an academic response in the alternate universe in which Zampanô’s account is true:

As was already mentioned in Chapter III, some critics believe the house’s mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it. Dr. Haugeland asserts that the extraordinary absence of sensory information forces the individual to manufacture his or her own data. [201—Missing. — Ed.] Ruby Dahi, in her stupendous study of space, calls the house on Ash Tree Lane ‘a solipsistic heightener,’ arguing that ‘the house, the halls, and the rooms all become the self—collapsing, expanding, tilting, closing, but always in perfect relation to the mental state of the individual.’ [202—Ibid]. Curiously DahI fails to consider why the house never opens into what is necessarily outside of itself.

The team Navidson assembles includes Reston, an ex-military contractor who lost both legs in a freak accident captured on film by Navidson, and Holloway, a sort of Iron John of the forest, hunter, trapper, armed, and an unstable personality all rolled into one. Few people other than the family and the explorers enter the house, but when they do they too experience something of which they will not speak, as when the local sheriff arrives to investigate the disappearance of one of the team. The typography is that of the text:

Sheriff Axnard went in there by himself. He
walked ten feet in and then walked straight
back out, thanked us and left. He never said a
word about where he’d been and he never
came back. He spent a good amount of time
looking for Holloway everywhere else but
never in the house.

Navidson is not alone in his encroaching insanity. Johnny Truant is increasingly prone to hallucinations, coincidences, premonitions and the feeling that he is being stalked by something monstrous. Late in the book, Johnny is in a bar and hears a band singing strange but familiar lyrics, one of which is: “I live at the end of a five-and-a-half-minute hallway”.

The Five-and-a-Half-Minute Hallway is the title of Navidson’s first short film about the changing house, and Johnny gradually realizes that the house, and Zampanô’s account of the film, are now in the public domain, as well as firmly entrenched in his own head.

House of Leaves is unheimlich, a German word meaning “strange” or “uncanny”, and one of the book’s many digressions is on Heidegger’s use of the word. Continental philosophy makes its appearance in HOL, as Derrida is cited, and Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space is quoted several times among the forest of footnotes ad academic references.

In fact, the book features a great deal of academic showing off, and footnotes and citations often seem included simply to reflect the fact that the author is comprehensively well read. There is a two-page footnote simply listing authors relevant to some point being made about the house, and a similar one-page fanfare of architects. But to call this showboating extraneous is to miss the point; the whole book is extraneous.

Parts of the text are quite beautifully constructed, as well as dovetailing classical literature with science. The section on the nymph Echo is charming, and the accompanying disquisition on modern theories of sound reflection painstaking. This is nothing if not a thoroughly post-modern book.

Perhaps in order to cover all bases, HOL is also a love story of sorts. Navidson’s wife Karen is deeply in love with her husband, and her desperation at his growing obsession with the house and its strange depths is yet another sub-plot, as well as sparking reams of critical analysis of the emotional ties the explorations expose. Her claustrophobia also allows another short essay on the subject, as with every other psychological facet of the various characters.

The book’s appendices are a by-now-familiar torrent of irrelevance and suggestion. Drawings and Polaroids of the house, poems, and a series of distraught letters to Truant from his mother from the asylum in which she is held, all constellate around the main character of HOL; the house.

The monster hinted at by the gouge-marks in Zampanô’s apartment is also present, seen but unseen throughout HOL in all its nested tales. It may or may not have killed the old man, but Truant feels its presence behind and around him, while in the depths of the house, the explorers hear an “unholy growling” in the dark depths which they take to be the noise of the house expanding, but fear the worst. There is an extended meditation on labyrinths in general, and that of Daedalus in particular, the one in which Icarus’ father installed a Minotaur, and which Theseus had to penetrate and return using Ariadne’s thread. The house, like the book, is a maze, and one which may contain hidden terrors. HOL has often been called a “terrifying” book, which is going a little far, but it does contain disturbing mysteries.

Is House of Leaves pretentious? Most certainly. Its pretension is a large part of its appeal. Is it experimental? Absolutely. It takes its place in a strange tradition of books which dislocate and confound the sense of straightforward narrative which usually obtain in the novel. It could be vaguely compared with Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. The internet was wild for the book from its publication, and is not short of ingenious exegeses explaining the “real meaning” of the book. But is it worth reading? I would say yes, if only to see what the fuss is all about, although I can’t guarantee you’ll like it. Perhaps, chiming with the book’s epigram, “This is not for you.”