#206: HOUSE OF LEAVES | AN ARCHITECTURAL READING

It’s not something I usually do—review a book, that is. Critically speaking, I wouldn’t call this a book review. It is more of an architectural observation. Reading and experiencing Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 debut novel, House of Leaves, is an encounter through space and time. Yes, a physical phenomenon—much more than simply turning pages.

Of this bestseller translated into numerous languages, Amazon states, “The mind-bending cult classic about a house that’s larger on the inside then on the outside. A masterpiece of horror and an astonishingly immersive, maze-like reading experience that redefines the boundaries of a novel.”

House of Leaves is difficult to summarize. More than a tale within a tale, it is a fictional story:

• about a man, Johnny Truant,
• who is reading an academic critique by a dead man named Zampano,
• about an autobiographical documentary film, The Navidson Record, about a haunted house,
• created by photojournalist, Will Navidson.

Sure, the fact that this book is about a house makes it inherently architectural, but the story explores many themes in the design lexicon, e.g., labyrinth, Piranesian space, Escher’s loops, size and scale, signifier/signified, palimpsest, material sampling, chiaroscuro, compression and contrast, zeitgeist, mazes, and so on.

But it is the book’s graphic design that will confront the reader initially, starting simply with the word “house,” always printed in bright blue. The book’s design evolves from there with text in red but then crossed out, diverse fonts, a standard page of text vs. only one word per page, illegible paragraphs, upside down words, even music notation and Braille in graphic form. Several pages require the reader to turn the book in a spiraling pattern to read the words.

These graphic elements may appear at first indulgent, but they challenge the norms of book publishing and printing, testing the gravity of what we expect. Disorienting the reader, the presentation intensifies the terror of the story about inhabitants disappearing within the walls of a seemingly innocent small house. Within this home, hallways are miles long, a staircase descends forever, walking across a mere room can take days, and darkness is shiveringly cold. Yet on the exterior, the house is a conventional house. For example, page 122 reads, “It is not surprising then that when Holloway’s team finally begins the long trek back, they discover that the staircase is much farther away than they had anticipated, as if in their absence the distances had stretched.”

The tale is replete with footnotes, citations, interviews, and exhibits, all appearing rigorous and real (Stephen King, Jacques Derrida, Anne Rice, Stanley Kubrick, Hunter Thompson), but actually fictional. With the house suggested to be older than the Earth, I am enveloped, confronted even, with matters of risks, life and death, husband/wife love, family and children, obsession, ambition, fantasies and lastly, paranoia.