Take the following. "The Approach to Al-Mutasim": instead of writing a novel, Borges writes a review of the nonexistent book. "The Blair Witch Project": a horror movie in the guise of an is-it-real-or-not documentary. "Pale Fire": the life of the editor takes over the work, a less-than-sane counterpoint in the footnotes. "The Garden of Forking Paths": Borges describes a book that is also a Labryinth. Take these, throw in every haunted-house story you've read, add some weird shit, put in a blender, bake at 350. Out comes The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, as rich and strange as anything I've read for some time. (Another first novel -- I'm not doing a theme, honest.)
Will Navidson, a photojournalist, has decided to stop roaming the earth and settle down with his family. Odysseus in Ithaca at last. He also wants to make a documentary about his new-found domesticity, so he puts cameras all over the place, a la The Real World. Except there's something wrong with their new house: it's bigger on the inside than the outside. Much bigger. In a really scary kind of way. (You'd think the realtor would have told them the house had a hell of a walk-in closet.) Navidson's documentary turns into a very very different film , one that freaks out the public and generates about as much critical work as Hamlet.
Of course the documentary doesn't exist. We read about it in "The Navidson Record," a book by a blind man (!) named Zampano (a Borges stand-in?). Zampano gives us the film, its criticism and place in the public consciousness, only once (that I found) letting on that he's making it up.
But wait! There's more! Zampano dies under mysterious circumstances, and his collection of notes comes into the possession of Johnny Truant, a would-be tattoo artist in LA. Truant starts to piece together the book, and figure out what the hell Zampano was trying to do. He provides his running commentary in the footnotes -- on the film, on Zampano, on his own life. And soon, whatever was stalking Navidson, and Zampano, begins stalking him. All three -- and by extension, Danielewski, and maybe even you the reader -- become obsessed with the darkness at the heart of the house's labryinth, or by the story of it. You get the sense that the true monster in the maze is the book itself.
The House Of Leaves *is* a maze, with paths running between text, appendices, footnotes. At times the text itself runs amok, at others each page is like a frame of film. There are more layers to The House of Leaves -- Truant's book becomes an underground hit, and this "second edition" has another layer of editorial comment -- and it twists in on itself in ways I don't want to give away.
There's a lot more to say about The House of Leaves -- there's the love story (or stories), and Johnny's insane mother who becomes the book's third narrator -- but I'll let you find all that out for yourself. Or you can just buy the album (Haunted, by Poe, who is Danielewski's sister.) Anyway, I recommend it, but don't blame me if you lose sleep....
| Mazes | Nabokov | Scary | The Curious Bookshelf
