House of Leaves
by Mark Z. Danielewski
The recap
A family moves into a house in rural Virginia and discovers something impossible: the inside measures slightly larger than the outside. Soon a dark hallway opens where no hallway should be, and it keeps going. That premise is only the innermost layer of Mark Z. Danielewski's labyrinthine debut. The story of the house reaches us through an exhaustive academic study of a documentary film, written by a blind old man named Zampanò, whose scattered papers are found and annotated by Johnny Truant, a Los Angeles tattoo-shop apprentice with troubles of his own. Footnotes sprout footnotes, pages shrink to a single word or flip upside down, and text runs sideways, backward and through mirrored boxes as the reader is drawn deeper. It is a haunted-house story, a portrait of a fraying family, a parody of scholarship and a puzzle box all at once. Reading it becomes a physical experience, and its creeping unease tends to follow you around long after you close the book.
Why read it
For adventurous readers who enjoy puzzles, footnotes and slow-burning dread, and who don't mind turning the book sideways to keep reading.
Fun facts
- 01
Before Pantheon published it in 2000, pieces of the manuscript had already circulated online and been passed around among readers, helping build its cult following.
- 02
Danielewski told BookPage he was involved in the entire production, from copy editing through page layout, and that finishing the book took roughly two years after it was bought.
- 03
The word "house" is printed in blue every time it appears in the text.
- 04
His sister, the singer Poe, released the album Haunted in 2000 as a musical counterpart to the novel, with Danielewski reading passages on several tracks; the siblings toured bookstores together to promote both.
- 05
The novel won the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award.
