During Exploration #5 Navidson had no illusion about what he would find there.  While staring into those infernal halls, we can hear him mutter: “Lazarus is dead again.”

  XVII Footnote 374 page 395.

 

Ah, that pitchy, architecture and physics defying region makes me suspect that the crawling woman from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ may well be, even now, making her way along those ashen walls.

Stranger things might be found there.

Or very little at all.

House of Leaves...

Is a big, bad, bastard of a book.

A work of fiction (?) with its own index.

A craft project from a confused and disturbed mind.

A well educated upstart’s wank with no climax.

A cruel collage.

    Hefty, heavy, (go on – when you catch one slap it – Hard!  Drop it on a desk from a decent height.  It resonates not just in words and format.  Its dull thud, thump, informs it as – Book!).  You can go around slapping walls with this tome, try it, it’s great!  Heck, you can practically hammer nails with it.

It is hard going, if you are a reader who doesn’t like to let a word get by you.  An ‘easy read’ Not. ¹

It might take you a month to read!

It could infuriate you.                            

It is arrogant.                                     

Impertinent.

Deathly dull.

Insufferable in parts.

                                  And it has

                                                      oh so many

                                                                              parts.

It is a liar’s bullshitting mouth.

It’s an anus with word diarrhoea.

It’s a simple list.

It

is

a whale.

And a wail.

                                                                              A formless, senseless behemoth.

And of course, self referential.

It will piss you off.                                               You will dislike at least

                                                                              one

It contains some good writing.                             of its characters.

 

And some appallingly bad writing.                      Possibly two.

 

It will make you resent the fact that you just spent (whatever quantity) of your own time reading that.

It sucks away               at                                                                           time . . . . .

It has given some people nightmares apparently.

Don’t think it’s gifted me any.

But maybe I can’t

differentiate

the ones

it has

collaborated on with me.

You will either

love

or

hate

it.

It’s nothing new.

But it is a very thick, big effort of nothing new.

It’s sly.

Something nestles at the core of it.  Like a big fanged cat or a scorpion.

 

Of course real horror does not depend upon the melodrama of shadows or even the conspiracies of night.

XVIII page 415.

 

Back in 99 I was working on an experimental novel entitled ‘The Pet AKA The Atrocity Box’.  It was done in a style I came to title ‘mosaic’.  A broken style with font, time, spacing, narration and perspective changes and other odd stuff.

Little did I know that Mr. Danielewski was labouring away at his own unique piece of ‘X’ literature.  Subsequently published in 2000.  A Hill House of a book.  A haunted book.

This one runs the whole gamut.  Pulling in everything it can grab to its black hole soul.

The extensive footnotes and lists are two of its less pleasing conceits.  But hang in there, keep paying out the line behind you, after 150 pages it’s not so bad.

When he sticks to his central narrative Danielewski gives us a tale of good Stephen King grade work.  (King actually makes a type of cameo appearance, as does Stanley Kubrick and a number of others.)  As is often the case, not really being a ‘Horror’ writer helps his horror writing.

For me however, the best thing about this book is that it is a book.  It demonstrates the possibilities that a book can be heir to.  At that it may only be scratching the surface of multi media potentials.  And all that encompassed in a disseminatory entertainment form that we have been told for the longest time is either dying or dead.

Well, this one’s come back friends, risen with a rustling of ‘leaves’ up from the publisher’s stack.  And it ain’t no zombie.  It truly lives.

It is neither ground breakingly unique nor particularly good or particularly bad.

But I thought it needed comment.  For its true talent is not its creator, but the fact that it has been compiled, and thus wise.

It simply sits and is a book whether you want to wrestle with it or not.  It simply is.

And as a book it is sufficiently different to garner interest.  Its creator has a philosophy on books you see (which is a good thing for writers to have).

And that’s a good thing for books.

It will cost you though, to read this book.  For you will have to

Expend

Time.

 

What then makes anything exciting? or better yet: what is exciting?  While the degree varies, we are always excited by anything that engages us, influences us or more simply involves us.  In those endlessly repetitive hallways and stairs, there is nothing for us to connect with.  That permanently foreign place does not excite us.  It bores us.  And that is that, except for the fact that there is no such thing as boredom.  Boredom is really a psychic defense protecting us from ourselves, from complete paralysis, by repressing, among other things, the meaning of that place, which in this case is and always has been horror.

 X page 167.

 

There are two primary narrators (though the duty is shared by many) neither operating with a ‘right mind’.  Though both could be super sane.