House of Leaves: Book Review

The first words are "This is not for you".
Oh, the hours I would have saved if I had
 listened...

"This book will blow your mind!"

"It has such a unique style!"

"It's such a mind trip, it's like acid in book form!"

That's pretty much the gist of what the reviews were for this book. As usual, there were the occasional ones scattered throughout that were at least somewhat negative, a few middling and so forth, but the majority were claiming some great feat of literary genius that takes you to other worlds. Heck, I wanted a part of this, and I wanted a part of it now. Everywhere I looked I ran into gushing praise about this book where a house seemingly comes alive, and the book finds a life of its own along with it. It makes you turn it upside down, read pages out of order, the colour and font change, sometimes the words on the page form shapes... well, I was intrigued. I ordered the book online, and soon enough it was on my doorstep and I was brimming with excitement - excitement that is usually reserved for video games, so really, this was out of the norm.

The main selling feature of the book is a house that has boundaries that defy logic. Inside a hallway lies an endless chamber of rapidly changing dimension, and on the outside it appears mostly normal with the exception of the fact that the inside and outside length and width do not match up as they should. All of this is detailed in a documentary called The Navidson Record that follows a family within the house and their expeditions around the corridors of endless blackness. That basic description grabbed me. It sounded original, a little creepy, and I was genuinely curious where it was going to turn. A second storyline follows Johnny Truant, a drugged-up, semi-attractive man who stumbles upon a series of notes on the Navidson Record and feels compelled to complete them in one way or another. Through his travels he meets prostitutes, does more drugs, and any variety of things that make him "edgy" to the point it feels absurd and forced - oh, he's a tattoo artist too. The style was interesting at the very least, and the plot of the house showed potential, even if Truant did not.

Unfortunately, as the story wears on (it's far too long and filled with excessive, needlessly wordy description), you begin to realize most of it relies on gimmick; it's a clear-cut case of style over substance. I mean, I get it - placing one word on each page makes it seem like everything is being read in slow motion. Sometimes the words are near the top or the bottom of the page, symbolizing the difference in space in the subject matter that's going on at the time in the novel. They're neat little tricks, and they're enough to captivate your interest for the first few times it happens. However, the book is staggeringly long, and my patience started to run dry when I realized that beneath all the gimmicks lies a painfully uninteresting series of characters and events.

Not once did I feel the slightest moment of interest in a character in the novel. Johnny Truant is painfully bland; his character slowly grows insane, but since he's such an unlikeable character at the core I feel nothing for him. His personality is never really fleshed out properly, as with literally every other side character. Even the positive reviews (and there are inexplicably many) so rarely mention the characters which take so much of the space in the novel. To reference some television moments here, as T.V. makes everything easier, take a look at Breaking Bad. It wasn't just the events that capture you in that show - it was that you legitimately cared deeply for what happened to the individuals in the show (except Skyler, I hate Skyler). Here, some die, go crazy, and other things which should elicit a response but in the end you feel absolutely nothing for them as you're too busy focusing on being in awe that a book makes you turn it upside down for a few pages to read it.

The book reads as if the author, Mark Danielewski, is patting himself on the back with one hand and typing with the other. It is so heavily laden with pretension it practically oozes out of the pages. Gimmick after gimmick, supposedly dark and deep conversations, reminiscent of True Detective but falling well short, and an ambiguous Lost type ending that serves more as a cop-out than a proper closing. Similar to Lost, I feel I have been robbed of my time; they build up so much, promising you, urging you to finish them to explain what is going on but then neatly packaging it with an unfulfilling ending that explains nothing but the fact that they didn't know how to end it all along. It goes to show how easily you can build up a mystery if you don't have to solve it. It's like calling a puzzle the most difficult one on the planet simply by removing a piece.

House of Leaves made me turn the book upside down, read a variety of font types and colours, had me flip pages quickly, frustrated me with the order in which to read them, and sent my eyes all over the book for footnotes - but one thing it certainly failed to do was entertain. With incomplete, bland characterization and a plot that ultimately goes nowhere, I can't find it in me to turn even a slightly positive spin.