📖 BOOK REVIEW⠀📚 House of Leaves
AUTHOR: Mark Z. Danielewski @markzdanielewski
Publisher: Random House @randomhouse
Stars: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ + 🐢
Published: March 7, 2000
The Review 📚
✨ The Title/Cover Draw:
- This book popped up on my radar and the format excited me. Both Marshall and I decided to read it at the same time.
💜 What I liked:
- The most interesting part of the book was going on a hunt and reading it in an unconventional way. I also really loved the story of the house itself. I briefly worked at the Winchester Mystery House back in the day and this house really reminded me of that in a lot of ways.
😱 What I didn’t like:
- I gave this book 4 stars because it was written smartly with connections I barely caught. But I did not enjoy this book TBH. Truant’s story, while lending itself to the story of the house, was my least favorite thing.
💁♀️ The Characters:
- Truant writes about his life while editing the story of Navidson’s experience with his house that Zampano has already edited. After that, there are more editors.
🚦 My face at the end: 🤦♀️
💭 5 Reasons to Read:
- If you like scavenger hunts, this is a doozy.
- If you like horror novels, there are elements in this book.
- Books about creepy houses up your alley?
- Do you like to savor and understand your books (or are you ok with just taking it at face value)?
- Do you have time to invest in 700 pages?
All thoughts and opinions are my own.
📘 Summary 📚 House of Leaves
Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth—musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies—the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.
Now, for the first time, this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and newly added second and third appendices.
The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story—of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.