Week 2: form vs. content and how that gave me nightmares

I first read House of Leaves this past spring, and frankly it's going to take an awful lot of pressure from somewhere before I do it again. House of Leaves is maybe the scariest book I've ever read. And I don't mean that in a things-jumping-out-of-closets kind of way. This story is creepy in how quickly and easily it got under my skin, clearly oblivious to my need for sleep.

The story is a framed narrative: a guy named Johnny Truant finds a book called the Navidson Record in a dead man's apartment and decides to read it. The Navidson Record is quasi-academic work about a film of the same title. In an effort to keep things straight, the Navidson Record appears in Times New Roman font, while the footnotes added by Johnny are in Courier.

The Navidson Record begins as a harmless story about Tom and Karen Navidson and their two children as they move into a new house. Everything is normal until the house starts to change and grow of its own accord. For instance, a hallway appears where there wasn't one before. The dimensions inside the house are altered, but those same measurements on the outside remain unchanged. Then a huge tunnel opens up, followed by a spiral staircase and endless passageways made of dark, light-absorbing stone. Tom Navidson gathers some friends and experts and together they explore the house, collecting video footage as they go. Parallel to this, Johnny writes footnotes describing his breakdown while he reads the Record.

What fascinates me about House of Leaves is the work the reader has to do in order to keep up. The whole thing is peppered with footnotes, footnotes of footnotes, references to other sources and sections of the text. There are appendices and pages with one word printed on them. Other pages are columns or mirror-image text, upside-down or sideways. There's an index. And yet an editor or publisher had the gall to stick the words "A Novel" on the front cover. And okay, sure, it's a work of fiction. But I don't think "novel" even begins to cover it. I made a choice to read House of Leaves start to finish and not follow enticing suggestions to consult other parts of the text as they came up - it was just too complicated.

Then it happened. I started having nightmares about endless dark hallways and doors I couldn't reach. It got bad enough that started reading Cake Wrecks every night to soothe myself. There is a moment when Tom Navidson is stuck alone in this maze of a house, wandering, desperately trying to find his way back to reality. He is utterly disoriented, and as if to prove this point, the text in the book flips upside down and scoots downward, so that one line sits at the bottom (or what is rightfully the top) of the page. When I reached this point, I instinctively started turning the pages the wrong direction, back the way I'd come. The reader is just as confused as Navidson: which way do I go to get the heck out of this book?

You can skip those pages if you want to. But by resisting the form, the reader also resists the content. A reader who isn't willing to play with House of Leaves will get nothing out of it. My nightmares are also a sign of success; Johnny Truant gets them too.

If you haven't read House of Leaves, I'd recommend it at your own risk. If you haven't read Cake Wrecks, you should do that (but you didn't hear it from me).

Works Cited

Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. Toronto: Random House, 2000. Print.

Yates, Jen. Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong. Kansas: Andrews        

          McMeel Publishing, 2009. Print.