I gotta hand it to Danielewski. This book is a crazy, crazy ride. I've read reviews where people were complaining that reading it made them motion sick and my reaction was Yes! Me too! Isn't it awesome?!?! While House of Leaves was wonderfully creative and groundbreaking in its format and storytelling, I was a little disappointed in . . . what? Can I put my finger on it? For one thing, I hated Johnny Truant. His digressions had me eventually skimming over anything in Courier font. I wanted more material about the house. But maybe that's the point. Giving the readers a taste of something horrifying - but just a taste. Everything else is left to the imagination. I'll admit though, my imagination is pretty lame.

Pour être étrange, c'est étrange! Je ne sais pas à qui je recommanderais ce livre.

Je dois dire que j'ai été profondément ennuyée par les parties de Johnny Errand. D'où la cote mitigée que je mets.
On m'avait dit que ça pouvait être un peu épeurant comme livre. Faut croire que je n'ai jamais assez embarqué dans l'univers pour avoir peur.

Mais si vous aimez fouiller dans un livre et trouvez tous les détails, ce livre est génial pour ça.

The first time I read this book was in high school, and I remember feeling punched in the gut, mind blown by the labyrinth of sadness and loss trapped in those pages, by the deconstruction of my expectations of how a novel should look, feel, sound, progress. I remember trying to search online for a hint of the truth of the characters and layers of stories within, but coming up empty. What source could I trust? Was the creature roaring in the dark one or many or one made of many? How old was that house, really? Why did it shift and churn and singe and swallow? How did Johnny's manuscript escape into the world without having completed it? How can this story be caught in the loop of being written and burned to nothing at the same time? I carried the story with(in) me quietly for all these years, never removing the bookmark from the index at the end. The decision to re-read *House of Leaves* was the best I could have made. I realize now how much I missed back then, how brilliant and twisted and layered and intricate and carefully selected every letter, space, and breath truly is. It remains one of the most troubling, haunting, emptying, disquieting, and brilliant books I have ever read. I still feel trapped in its circuitous orbit, roaming an endless staircase seeking light and answers for Johnny, for his mother, for Zampano', for Navy and Karen, for the underground circuit of seekers who have seen and not seen this impossible place, yet finding myself still in the belly of the whale. The book itself is both the labyrinth and the Minotaur at its heart. Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys a challenge to the senses and expectations of what a novel can and should do - and how it's done - and to anyone looking to get lost in a labyrinth of love and fear and the human condition, of impossibility, of echoes of time and space, of the infinite cycle of creation and destruction.

I will warn anyone that this is not an easy read - not just literally because the pages go all twisty and wild, but because there’s a lot of really heavy subject matters in this book that may be hard for some. It was hard for me. I would recommend looking up content warnings if you are on the fence and are nervous about any triggers.



This book is unlike anything I’ve read before. I loved it. My amazing friend sent to to me as a gift while I recover from jaw surgery. When I first flipped through the pages and saw how complex they are, I thought “there’s no way I’m smart enough to read this. And it’s going to take me like five years to finish it.” But I’m happy to say that I am smart enough to read this book and I did it in like a month and a half!!!!

As far as the story goes, it’s absolutely fascinating. How it’s told, the multiple levels… wow! This book genuinely scared me at times and I’m not sure I’ve ever read another book that scared me like this. But it was a fun scare, if you’re terrified of the dark - BE WARNED.

When I encountered the red words that were struck, I went to google. I thought, I must know how I’m supposed to read this and I didn’t have the slightest idea on what it meant. Google took me to Reddit, where many people said to just read everything as it comes up. It was overwhelming to think about, because it seemed so complex already! Now red words?! Give me a break! But then I saw that someone described the book itself as a labyrinth, one that we, the reader, must figure out as we go. And that drastically helped me with my understanding of how to read this book. Understanding that the book itself is its own labyrinth somehow made everything click for me. It made it way easier to tackle these wacky pages and the confusing formatting.

The formatting, much like the layout of the house, is constantly changing. This gives us, the reader, a sense of what exploring the house felt like. You cannot get comfortable, just when you start to, things change and you have to essentially find your way back to familiarity. Except the second you do, it changes again. I absolutely love how every detail, every aspect of this book is there, in a way, to confuse but ultimately inform the reader of what’s going on. The second I pieced all of that together is the second I started to understand the book even more. It made it a very fun puzzle to figure out.

Anyways, this book is really cool, really spooky, and fun to figure out. Very sad though, oh my gosh, my heart was so heavy at times. OH and unreliable narrators which is something I have always loved in movies, tv, books. SO YEAH it was fun trying to figure out what was real and what wasn’t. But there was some gross sexual dialogue that ya girl was not a fan of. It was a lot. And there was a part with a pug that I HATED. Boo!! We don’t like that part! But overall, it was a fascinating read and I would love to read more books like this with puzzles and twists and turns.

More sex than I remembered (and my comfort level there has dropped), but it’s still fantastic.

***

Okay, I came back here and read a bunch of the comments and had to revise mine. It’s amazing how much this book inspires love or inspires hate. Either you “get” it or you don’t.

Here’s the thing. House of Leaves is about trauma. It’s about the trauma of a photojournalist and his family. It’s about the trauma of an old blind man. It’s about the trauma of a young man who grew up in an abusive foster care system who gets sucked into the other two stories. And it’s the trauma of Danielewski working through his own father’s death. My job involves some research on sex addiction, and the top-level story is textbook Body-Keeps-The-Score trauma lived out. It’s also the literary equivalent of a conspiracy theory pin-board, all within the framework of an academic analysis of a movie about architectural horror.

If that sounds fascinating, pick it up. If it sounds terrible and pretentious, don’t. You do have to be willing to embrace it for what it is. I did 20 years ago as a surprisingly naive undergrad, and I did now, as a researcher of very heavy topics. Because this book will allow you to plumb the depths of your own soul—shallow or dark and deep as it may be—but you have to let it.