Review of House of Leaves
Blurb: A young family 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.
Review: The Navidson Record tries to film the regular everyday events of a family moving into a new home only to have it turn into a nightmare. Johnny Truant finds the notes of an old man, Zampano who was obsessed with the Navidson Record and thus Johnny becomes obsessed as well.
I want to start off by saying that this book was not for me. I tried reading this book a decade or so ago and couldn't finish it, but with all the hype around it, I wanted to give it another chance. I love haunted house novels, and if this book were only about the Navidsons and their house, I might have enjoyed it. Yet it's pretentious to the point I could not connect with the story. IMMENSELY pretentious. I had to push myself onward to finish it. There is a lot of philosophical talk and seemingly endless footnotes. While I understand the strange formatting is meant to mirror the labyrinthine nature of the house and the fading sanity of the characters, it annoyed me.
This book has three layers. The first is the Navidson Record. Will Navidson, his partner Karen, and their two children. They move into a house in Virginia that slowly becomes bigger on the inside until it becomes something infinite. I enjoyed those bits as they were described, but not the analyses of it. And there were TONS of analyses of it. The second layer is Zampano who is an old man who lives in Johnny's building. He's a hermit and he dies. I wished we had more about Zampano, but his bits were tiny. He was obsessed with the Navidson Record, and Johnny finds all his notes after he dies. The present narrator, the third layer, is Johnny, a young man who works in a tattoo parlor, drinks too much, does even more drugs, and has a vicious temper. I could not stand Johnny, and I didn't empathize with him in any way. By the time he found Zampano's notes, he was already on his way to insanity. It could have been anything to push him along, but it just happened this particular thing was what grabbed his obsessive nature and brought him down.
This story is about trauma, obsession, and madness and how it becomes liminal horror. Every character has suffered extreme trauma. Each of them was damaged before the house has touched them. It might even be the fact that Zampano didn't exist and thus the Navidson Record didn't exist, and it was just Johnny writing it all. He proves again and again he is an unreliable narrator. You also don't get any answers about anything that happens. Which, again, is probably because Johnny is insane.
I say madness is like liminal horror, because liminal horror takes the mundane from everyday life and creates desolation and dread. Big empty spaces which should seem familiar--they're in a house, after all--but are empty of everything that gives the place life. In the Navidsons' house, the liminal spaces are dark and black. The men have to bring their own markers to be able to find the way back in the endless halls. Madness grows in everyday life until all you see is monsters and dark places. Of course, spin in a heavy dose of trauma, and that person is ripe for it. If you've seen the recent film, Backrooms, you'll get the feeling what of this story was trying to do. Two traumatized characters trapped in their own recurring horrific memories. Backrooms was heavily inspired by this book.
Comments