The Scariest Book Ever Written?! (House of Leaves - Mark Danielewski)

Member Name: zusy

Product:	House of Leaves - Mark Danielewski
Date:	28/07/00 (385 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Creepy, addictive, unique

Disadvantages: May not be to some people's tastes if you like a beginning middle and end

When self-proclaimed sicko Bret Easton Ellis (author of 'American Psycho') says he may never recover from reading such a scary book, you know you have to try it for yourself.

In his review of Mark Z. Danielewski's debut novel, Ellis goes further and states that it is "...Thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy, distressingly scary, breathtakingly intelligent - it renders most other fiction meaningless...I feel privileged to be among its first readers. Will I ever recover?"

This book has been hyped up in America as the text equvallent of the smash-hit film 'The Blair Witch Project'. The publishers have even gone so far as to replicate the spooky/weird website to promote it (go to www.houseofleaves.co.uk). I went here first to have a look and see if it was worth the hype. I have to say I was disappointed with the site, it's all design and not much content. Anyway, never to judge a book by it's website (heh) I decided to use a free book token I had to buy myself a copy and see what all the fuss was about.

It arrived this morning, so obviously I haven't finished it yet, but I must share my feelings so far....this book is *weird*. It's the strangest most gripping book I believe I've read for some time.

The story, it turns out, has many 'authors'. It's variously 'written' by (obviously) Danielewski himself; then purportedly by a young man called Johnny Truant...who finds a bizarre notebook written by a reclusive old man who calls himself Zampano...who is, in turn, writing about the video diary of a man and his family who move into a house where something horrific happens...

If this sounds complicated, it is. The novel takes the post-modern concept of doing away with linear, logical progress, and instead you find overlapping, intertwining stories; scrawled notes in margins; pictures; blank and missing pages; unreadable text. It starts with Truant accounting of h
ow he came to find the old man's book and works backwards from there..then jumps forward to the present again and so on. As the book begins, Johnny says:

"I still get nightmares. In fact I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I'm not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares."

More than simply being a horror story to read, this novel attempts to implicate the reader directly in the process...you become part of the story simply by reading it. It is also implied that, having read it, you too will be drawn into the nightmares of 'the house' and its power...

"Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
And then the nightmares will begin."

The complexity of this novel may put some people off - it's an unsettling experience reading it. I had to go back and read some parts again, already, but this furthers your understanding of the clues to be found, the patterns that emerge...you follow Johny as he does the very same thing with 'Zampano's notebook. This is, indeed, a *very* clever book - it asks questions of the reader, it challenges our belief that 'the camera never lies' (and that 'experts' never lie). It throws up all sorts of questions about Truth, Belief and Fear...as well as commenting on the industry that grows up a
round cult films/books - the endless psycological 'readings' and 'explanations', the power of the media. All of this and I'm only a few 'chapters' (if we can call them that) in!

I can't put the book down... a cliche but, in this case, a true one. Obviously I've had to put it down now to write this semi-review (I want to tell everyone about this book - the experience of reading it is like no other)...so if you'll excuse me, I have to go and be very scared again...

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