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Review [published June 2000]
Mark Danielewski: House Of Leaves
Gary Marshall
House Of Leaves is one of the strangest books we’ve
seen for some time. With multiple narrators, a mass of
footnotes and direct transcripts of video tapes, the novel
has been described as a “literary Blair Witch Project’ –
a description we’d wholeheartedly agree with.
The novel is narrated by Johnny Truant, a barhopping
low-life who is losing his grip on reality.
When an old man – Zampano – dies, Truant grabs a
manuscript from his apartment and takes it home to
read it. This manuscript is an analysis of The Navidson
Record, a collection of videotapes that record some
spooky goings on in a suburban house. As Truant
reads the manuscript, he reproduces it in full, sharing
his observations with us and describing his own
increasingly fragile mental state.
There are three main stories in House Of Leaves:
Truant’s reactions to the manuscript, Zampano’s analysis
of The Navidson Record, and the contents of the
videotapes themselves. As the novel continues, each
story overlaps. Zampano adds extensive footnotes to
his work and attempts to contact the famous people
(Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Camille Paglia)
mentioned in the tapes; Truant attempts to explain
the more tortuous footnotes, adding explanations and
analysis of his own, and unnamed ‘editors’ in turn comment
on both Zampano’s and Truant’s comments. The
Navidson Record would have made an excellent spinechiller
in its own right, but the analysis and footnotes
rack the creepiness up by a notch. In the early stages of
the transcripts, we know that something scary’s going
to happen: the footnotes tell us so.
As if the layers of comment weren’t complicated
enough, after a few dozen pages things go completely
mental. The word house is printed throughout in blue,
without explanation; footnotes become longer than the
sections they’re commenting on, print is reversed or
rotated
BUY Mark Danielewski books online from and
, entire sections are crossed out; some pages con-
tain a single word or letter, while others are filled with
lists of buildings or household amenities. All of these
things are reproduced faithfully, resulting in pages where
the only text is “XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX”,
other pages with letters and words missing due to “fire
damage” (the gaps are replaced by spaces and square
brackets), still others with text at crazy angles or tiny
190
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