Blair book project

>> House of Leaves is creepy and irritating postmodern horror

by JULIET WATERS

There's a legend behind House of Leaves that is difficult to verify. According to the dust cover, the novel started years ago as a "badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet." Over the years it developed a cult following, but this is the first time it has actually been made available in book form.

An Internet search, however, reveals very little about Mark Z. Danielewski or his début novel. Born in 1966, apparently Danielewski is also an actor who had a small part in the 1993 historical movie, Gettysburg. There's a positive Library Journal review of House of Leaves and a few notices of upcoming promotional appearances by the author. That's about it.

Still, the hoaxiness of the dust cover is weirdly appropriate, since the core of House of Leaves is a long critical essay about a "legendary" cult documentary that was never actually made.

According to this bogus essay, The Navidson Record started as an innocuous project by Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Will Navidson. When his marriage (with the beautiful but cold ex-supermodel Karen Green) starts to flounder, partly due to Navidson's constant travel schedule, he and his wife decide to buy a house. To satisfy his workaholism, Navidson starts filming a documentary about his family's experience moving into the house.

Things begin well, but soon start getting very Blair Witchey. Navidson discovers that the measurements of the interior of the house are bigger than the exterior. Sometimes the couple hears their children's voices echoing through the bedrooms upstairs, even though the rooms are average-sized. To reveal any more would wreck the suspense, but suffice it to say that there's a dark closet which becomes an endless abyss and an unholy growling beast that pounces at lightning speed.

Navidson's story itself is not that complicated, even with the ironies of an essay on the existing literature about a documentary made by a person who never actually existed. Where House of Leaves starts to get complicated--and believe me, it gets very complicated--is in the stories that surround the essay in the form of endnotes in various fonts.

Bear with me. The preface to the essay, written in Courier type, begins another tale. It is the story of an L.A. bohemian named Johnny Truant who discovers the essay in the squalid apartment of a blind old eccentric known only as Zampano. Judging from the evidence of three huge gashes in the floor, it would seem that he's been murdered by the aforementioned unholy growling beast. But even before the beast got to him Zampano seems to have become unhinged.

As has Johnny Truant. The progress of Zampano's disintegration as he reads, or, perhaps, writes the essay on Navidson, is told in Times font. The story of Truant's madness continues in Courier. The implied invitation is that we write our own endnotes as we too risk madness and/or death at the hands of the beast.

As House of Leaves continues, it morphs into a screenplay, poetry, chapters that are nothing but endnotes, chapters that are nothing but blank pages, rows of XXs, letters, photographs, Satanic cryptograms and eventually, after 663 pages, a 40-page index with listings for words like: for, found, fuck, fucker, fucking and funny.

Some readers will find the novel difficult to put down, while others will find it more difficult to pick up. Those who aren't driven over the brink of madness will probably have given up long before they've reached the brink of intense irritation. While Danielewski is an excellent writer in all his voices--the pseudo critic, the pseudo bohemian, the pseudo Satan--the format of the novel is relentlessly distracting. One should really be willing to devote a good month, or even a year, to reading this creepy, though extremely interesting tome. Not to mention the time one might want to allow for plastering up those claw marks.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski,Pantheon, pb., 706 pp, $29.95