This is not for you.

When I first tried to read House of Leaves, I was in my early twenties and spending a few summer vacation weeks house-sitting for a professor at my college.

I didn't make it far for two reasons:
1. I possessed little patience for Danielewski's footnotes and experimental formatting.
2. My first night in the house, I discovered that the closet in the master bedroom was not just a closet, but led through a mini-labyrinth of closets and a bathroom before opening onto another bedroom. It also contained a full-length mirror that created the illusion of another person standing in the dark when I opened the door.

It was too much. I slept with an uneasy eye on the closet door, and read a stack of trashy vampire romances, instead.

But I've always felt inadequate for not finishing House of Leaves. It's a staple of "Most Disturbing Books of All Time" lists, which I have consulted often enough to border on edgelord status. So I decided to tackle it again.

People talk about how difficult House of Leaves is and make a lot of noise about trying to figure out how to read it, which I think is misleading. You just read it. You follow the footnotes. You translate passages that are in languages you don't speak. You accept that some passages are there to confuse or frustrate you, or exist more for their substance than for their meaning. You read at the pace that the text dictates. And you have fun. Or at least, you should.

Because House of Leaves is a fun book. It immerses you in multiple eerie narratives, it gives you ample material to obsess over/ponder, and it contains some beautiful writing that emerges unexpectedly. It demands engagement, and in my opinion, engagement with a text is fun even when it's exhausting.

I love unreliable narrators, so House of Leaves is ideal for me because everything about this thing is unreliable. Johnny Truant tells you he's lying in the footnotes, but can you even trust him when he says he's lying? As a reader, you can't be sure of anything: the provenance or authorship of the text, the veracity of any information you're given (including quotes and citations), even the existence of the characters within their world. Is the Navidson Record real? Is Johnny a serial killer? Did Zampanò make it up? Did Pelafina make everything up? You just don't know!

This instability of reality is, I think, the most disturbing aspect of the book. In the text itself, as in the terrifying, infinite darkness within the Navidson house, you're unsure of your bearings. The book and the space inform and in ways become one another, and in struggling to pin down an objective truth, you project yourself onto both. And thus, what you find in House of Leaves is personal, and therefore personally unsettling.

I didn't sleep with the lights on, but I haven't stopped thinking about it since I turned the last page.