House comments

Starting to read House of Leaves I was real excited because so many people had said it was so fantastic. When I started reading it though, I found that I never really got immersed in the story. Perhaps my attention deficit was a little too disordered by the arrangement of text in this novel. I found it difficult to go back and forth from one narrator to the next, while literally thumbing backwards and forwards through the book. I also found Zampano's story of the Navidson Record to be supremely boring. I have a tough time believing that people actually get scared by this book. When they were measuring the house and finding it to be 5/16ths of an inch bigger on the inside, i was pretty much unaffected. Too much math, not enough blood to be scary.

Story aside though, I really enjoyed this book. I was really intrigued by the cover design, and kept trying to figure out it's meaning. The page behind the cover was also puzzling for me. I figure it was supposed to be a pile of things as they would have appeared in Zampanos apartment. This pile is fun to dissect, and see things that come up in the dtory such as the string and compass and drugs.

My favorite part about this book though was describing it to people when they asked me what ti was about. It usually went something like this: "It's a book...by a guy...about another guy...who is writing about himself, and another guy...who is writing about a movie...that doesn't exist...Oh, and it's 700 pages. Now let me read you bastard."

This book practically wrote the book on auhorship. There's just so many strange things about it. The fact that it's fiction but tries to pass itself off as fact, and uses many facts in several different fictional storylines. And on the title page, the actual aythor isn't even listed. In this sense, the book is entirely its own "world." House of Leaves is credited to Zampano, while introduction and notes are credited to Johnny Truant.

If I were writing a one sentence review of this book for the back cover, it would go something like this: "Fans of postmodernism, buckle your seatbelts, because you're about to be beaten to death with literary wiffle-bats." or something like that.