“House of Leaves” is spooky in all the right ways

Last year around Halloween, I wrote about how I believed that video games were the best medium to tell horror stories through. I theorized that the closer one is to the events depicted in horror stories, the more effective they are in eliciting the intended effect, that being to scare you. It’s why nearly all horror movies say they are “based on a true story.” The better the story can convince its audience that whatever is happening in it could also happen to them, the better it is at scaring them. Because video games bring you closer to the action by making you actually play as one of the characters in the story, they allow you to interact with the fictional horrors depicted in a more personal fashion than books or movies can.

Or so I thought. And while we may be a week or two removed from Halloween, I recently started a book that seems to be doing something that I have not seen before and I figured that we are still close enough to the spooky season that it would still prove relevant.

The book in question is “House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski. While I am only a tenth of the way through it, I can already tell that this book is tackling horror in a wholly unique fashion, at least when it comes to books. You see, “House of Leaves” is not written like a typical novel, but rather the interweaving of several different stories in one.

The main text is an analysis of a mysterious film called “The Navidson Record,” which is described as a sort of found footage movie similar to “The Blair Witch Project.” The film, which was supposedly filmed and edited by a man named Navidson, follows him and his family as they move into a new house and they begin to experience a number of strange phenomena. This is presented to the reader as an academic text written to examine the intricacies of the film.

While some may find this to be dry and perhaps give up before the story truly picks up, the nostalgia I felt for reading very similar texts in college had me eating this part up. For those familiar with academic papers like the one being portrayed, the strange idiosyncrasies found in these sections begin to point to something not being right. Rambling footnotes and overly colorful language to describe certain scenes in “The Navidson Project” stand out as odd and misplaced for such a text, and these things become ever more obvious the further you progress. Entire paragraphs written in German with no translation, two whole pages of just names in a footnote…something here is wrong.

Which leads to the second story; the story of the author of this academic paper, Zampano, and the one who found it, Johnny. These sections are interspersed with academic paper as Johnny inserts his own story of how he met Zampano and what coming into possession of Zampano’s manuscript has done to him in the footnotes. This section is written more like a typical, first person novel, though it becomes quickly apparent that something is very wrong with Johnny as well. Having to bounce back and forth between the academic paper and Johnny’s story only adds to the chaos.

A third layer is occasional comments from the editorial group that supposedly received this manuscript from Johnny and published it. It is this final layer that helps to solidify the effect that Danielewski appears to be going for: that all of this is true and that you, as the reader, are now implicated in everything that has happened. It uses the very nature of the medium of books and writes fiction as non-fiction to bring the reader as close as they can be to becoming a character within the story themselves, and thus subject to the potential horrors depicted.

Or, that’s what it appears to be doing. As I said, I’m only a tenth of the way through, so perhaps my early analysis is incorrect. Still, it is one of the more unique reading experiences I’ve had, and just flipping through the book and seeing the formatting of some of the pages, it looks like it will only get crazier from here. If you are still in the mood for something spooky, I’d say “House of Leaves” is worth giving a look at.

A C ERTAIN POINT OF V IEW

BY

NATHANIEL U NDERWOOD REPORTER