“˜House’ leaves reader in wordy maze of darkness

BOOK INFORMATION

Title: House of Leaves
Author: Mark Z. Danielewski
Publisher: Pantheon
Price:$19.95
Pages: 700

By Ryan Joe
Daily Bruin Contributor

The title house in Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of
Leaves” is a labyrinthine nightmare of caliginous corridors
that would leave H.P. Lovecraft scratching his head in awe.
Appropriately, the book is just as twisted and maze-like, sometimes
for better and sometimes for worse.

“House of Leaves” is an ambitious novel that
pretends to be an unofficial report assembled by a mysterious man
named Zampano and completed, posthumously, by Johnny Truant, a
young man who found Zampano’s manuscript.

Danielewski tells two different stories here: Zampano’s
portion, titled “The Navidson Record,” tells of
photographer Will Navidson and his family, who discover that their
house is infinitely bigger inside than it is outside; Johnny
Truant’s footnotes and inserts serve as a diary that
documents his downfall as he becomes increasingly enthralled with
Zampano’s manuscript.

The book looks a lot like a report ““ a poor man’s
X-File. Thankfully, it usually reads more like a novel, despite the
inane amount of footnotes and appendices which, incidentally,
comprise about half of the novel.

“The House of Leaves” has a dry and morbid wit that
resonates through its dark subject matter. This is a good thing
because when the book isn’t either dark or darkly funny,
it’s deathly dull.

Zampano often drones away on tangents filled to the brim with
scientific mumbo-jumbo in a vain attempt to explain the spatial
paradox of the Navidson’s house ““ this is cute and it
does show abnormality of the house. But at the same time, it stops
the flow cold as Zampano tries to explain something like
architectural acoustics.

Truant adds even more footnotes to Zampano’s collection of
“data,” and many often cross the threshold from formal
editing into informal editorializing and reminiscing.

Truant’s storyline attempts to demonstrate how easy it is
to get lost in the maze of the house, even vicariously through a
report.

His arc certainly adds to the mystique of the house, but
unfortunately, not the horror.

Truant’s journalistic tendencies, however, are
entertaining enough; they are funny sometimes, they are disturbing
sometimes and they are always interesting, even if they seem to
bear no relation whatsoever to “The House of Leaves” as
a whole.

“The House of Leaves” isn’t scary although it
evokes curiosity and intrigue. Danielewski’s house is a
jungle of rooms, winding corridors and staircases that seem to
stretch to infinity.

A sporadic growl penetrates the darkness as Will Navidson and
his colleagues immerse themselves in the suffocating darkness to
decipher the nature of the house.

For some reason, this search into the unknown is not as scary as
it could be. The twisted dimensions of the house, which are
infinitely more interesting than the characters that inhabit it,
outdoes itself.

The house is just too weird to be placed into words; it must be
felt and experienced, which is impossible since the house
doesn’t really exist. In fact, not even Johnny Truant, who
embarks on a mission to find it, can discover the house’s
whereabouts.

Infected by some mysterious disease wrought either by the house
and its undeniable presence, Truant records his downward mental and
physical spiral within the footnotes.

Or perhaps he was just irritated at having to read
Zampano’s occasional lapses into scientific
who-knows-what.

The problem with this arc is that Zampano’s notes on the
house affect Truant’s mindset, which catalyzes his slow
decline. But because the reader probably won’t be affected
the same way (if they are, psychiatric evaluation may be in order)
the question arises: what the heck is Truant’s problem? It is
difficult to wholly empathize with him.

“The House of Leaves” isn’t a bad book.
Danielewski does manage to convey eeriness with great success and
he doesn’t always attempt to explain incidents and phenomenon
that, by their nature, cannot be clarified.

The novel, disguised as a report complete with appendices and an
index (which are sometimes annoying and sometimes interesting), is
a literary version of “The Blair Witch Project.”

Danielewski obscures the line between fact and fiction with
moderate success, to make the events seem more threatening and more
real.

“The House of Leaves” is not nightmarishly horrific,
however it does create a good sense of cryptic unease.