House of Leaves: A Reader's Guide 

My favorite part of the book is the creeping feeling of dread I got when I started to think about how the House essentially vanishes and is reincarnated in each subsequent form. Once it becomes a documentary, the house vanishes; once the documentary becomes flooded over by critical analysis, the documentary vanishes; once Zampano compiled all of the criticism they all disappear; once Johnny finds the dissertation and edits it, Zampano "vanishes"; once the boom is published, Johnny and his story vanish. The House, the Labyrinth, changes form and assimilates everything it comes in contact with, leading to the terrifying conclusion that once you talk to other people about the book, you and the book will vanish as well, and it will continue to devour everything it can grasp with its claws of cold and darkness. I love your channel btw. you're an entertaining guy, and not pretentious like most lit students I meet.

After letting my thoughts about the book settle, I've come to believe that the House is, ultimately, whatever you think it is. Not in that there is no answer to the questions raised in the book, but that the house reacts to your expectations of it. In the beginning, the family believes that living there will bring them closer together. The House creates a connection between the bedrooms of the parents and kids. The mystery of the new space drives the family apart as Navidson becomes obsessed. The House becomes bigger on the inside, literally making them further apart. It keeps going on like this, with new characters shaping the House's nature with their expectations. Only when they stop trying to pin it down does the Hoise relent and let them leave. There is a Minotaur in the Labyrinth, yes, but it does not belong to the House. The House is an empty space that we fill with our own ideas. Including our fear of a monster that cannot be escaped.

Inspirations and forerunners to House of Leaves for those interested: Glas by Jacques Derrida (check out pages from the book on google images), Pale Fire (and other novels) by Vladimir Nabokov, The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo by W.G. Sebald, The Tunnel by William H. Gass, Mallarmé's poetry (especially 'A Throw of the Dice..'), Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Talmud, Medieval Illuminated manuscripts, not to mention the obvious influences and literary lineages including Lovecraft, Borges, Cortazar, Joyce, Pynchon, Wallace, Barth, Calvino, etc.

Danielewski himself describes the book as "a love story" rather than a horror story, which I think ties into why the house morphs and changes at certain points, and why some (like Navidson and Karen) escape it and have a "happy" ending, while others succumb to its horrors. Navidson basically accepts what the house is, and wants to explore it. He basically respects it, as Karen does too despite her claustrophobia, her fear of it (the feng shui she puts up, etc.) is a sign of respect. Holloway didn't respect the house, and it devoured him. The house sort of rewards the ones that embrace it, so when Karen finally walks into the black towards the end, she gives herself up to the house, and it rewards her by giving Navidson back. It could be argued that Zampano was killed - either by the minotaur or the house itself or both - because while he was similar to Navidson in wanting to document the house, he was too analytical about it. Navidson was a famed photographer more interested in how things felt, while Zampano wanted explanations and concrete facts, which the house couldn't allow. Sorry for the massive ramble, I'm not sure it even makes sense

It should be of interest to readers that singer/songwriter Poe is Mark Daniewski"s sister; she created the album Haunted in 1999, and it has some allusions and references to HoL.Poe and mzd did a bookstore tour together and discussed how the death of their father was a large inspiration for both of their works (Poe"s Haunted more explicitly). I recommend listening to the album for further context..

I've only read the book once, I plan to delve into the house once more at some point, but I've come to believe that Pelefina is a mentally ill woman who imagined a chunk of this (not necessarily ALL of this) and also had a large amount of religious beliefs, and through the combination of mental illness and religion, manifested her delusions into reality. She then hung herself and had become one with Yggdrasil, forming her, post-death into a personification of both Odin (hanging herself upon Yggdrasil to learn the runes) and Jormungandr (encircling the entire narrative, and by this all being both imaginative AND true, this makes her an ouroboros figure), and while hanging on the World Ash had gone on a journey to see every perspective, every form of reading. The end of the book is the new start. I also believe that the House is a god that only understands mortal emotion in a very alien way. It attached itself to the Navidson family, killed, hurt, and tortured them, not out of hate or a game or any kind of evil reason, but to do what Navidson and Karen set out to do and failed to do on their own, to finally heal this family. Note that the house vanishes and sets them free when Karen did the unthinkable and conquered her most deep fear, when she embraced her lover in a an alien dimension made of eternal darkness and unimaginable freeze, and in the eye of the storm and chaos and heartache and desperate...they embraced. Navidson uttering a word even in front of death. Though the family was scarred, they had been set on the path for a happily ever after, remember the price of un-love. Of un-homeliness. Only when each world is visited, each way of reading, each perspective, each order, only when all is seen, created, and visited by Odin and Jormungandr, by a "extraordinary woman" does the story finally end, mirroring the final poem. The house, the gods, the multiverse, even love itself was misinterpreted until now. The order was wrong at the beginning, it is not "What miracle is this? This giant tree. It stands ten thousand feet high but doesn't reach the ground. Still it stands. Its roots must hold the sky. O." No. instead it is the opposite, the more sensible, "O its roots must hold the sky. Still it stands. But doesn't reach the ground. It stands ten thousand feet high, this giant tree. What miracle is this?" Just a thought though, again I am yet to re-read.

One theory about this book which I find compelling is that House of Leaves is written by Johnny himself and not Zampano. There are clues here and there about it but I will talk the ones I personally find most interesting: 1) When theZampano's text is talking about the analysis of Navidson's dreams by the married couple, it mentions that Navidson had three dreams which were analyzed. However, Zampano's text only goes over the first two. Then the narrative goes to Johnny and he talks about remembering HIS dream in which he himself is the Minotaur and he is being murdered by a female figure (which I think is his mother, because after remembering the dream, he sells his mother's locket). Navidson's third dream is never talked about after Johnny talks about his dream. 2) At some point Johnny starts to think that every female figure he has ever known has been one way or another sexually assaulted. This could be a result of his mother's claims that she was being raped by her doctor. Soon after, Zampano's text talks about how Karen and her sister were possibly abused by their step father. 3) When Zampano's text talks about anxiety test proposed by two psychologists based on Navidson's record, the symptoms are all the ones Johnny has been experiencing ever since his attacks started. Is it possible that Navidson's character is a reflection of Johnny himself? That Navidson's struggles are the ones Johnny is dealing with? And that Johnny writes for Navidson the happy ending that he might have wanted for himself? The mother/female figure he craved for but did not get, Navidson finds in Karen who after exploration 5 stayed with Navidson in the hospital and nursed him back to health like a mother.

The passages where they explore the "maze" is what i remember best about this book. It's just so dark and cold and it sits there in the back of your mind like a bad dream. I read it last year and i still think about it. It was a struggle to get through but totally worth it.

For me the monster is the labyrinth, that is where the true invention and the contribution of the novel to the genre of horror exist. There are already novels about haunted house, but in this case the house is the disguise of the labyrinth, the house is the way that uses the maze to trap people inside, like a carnivorous plant. That in the same way it has no shape, because it is constantly transforming itself, its true function is to represent the emptiness. I agree with describing the figure of the minotaur as nothing, because that is what is frightening about him, but his place in the book is not so central, it is more like a threat in the third plane, I always understood it as one of the multiple mechanisms of the labyrinth to catch its victims. I would understand it more as a tool of a bigger and dangerous monster, which was the space where the characters are lost. The monster is that place because the fear produced by the book is more in a form of a phobia of ubiquity, that leads us to feel even more threatened, since its destructive capacity is intrinsic in the nature of the vacuum by which they feel surrounded. This is the sense of disorientation produced by the two narrative lines of the book. Absolutely brilliant idea. Pure existential terror.

I think the house of leaves is a book about relationships and dealing with childhood trama. The house and the mystery of it takes the backstage. Especially since the story is so character focused. Like the footnotes and the last part of the book are all about John and his mom and have very little to do with the house.

I've had this book for 3 years and never got around to it...maybe I'll finally try this summer

Very good video. Even better essays. Was a little surprised pelafinas letters weren't mentioned as i truly feel they add a whole new framing of which to view Johnny's narrative.

Love that you are uploading very frequently these days.

Do you know how good it feel to find an interview with the blind Borges on youtube and realizing for yourself that this really is, at least partly, Zampano. Hadn't heard anybody else point that out, even though it seems to be obvious if you read 20th century postmodern literature, which I don't. Figuring out for myself that the particular kind of weird that the Metal Gear Series has to offer, was in fact down to the game's post-modern writing, started my "search". So stumbling upon Johnny, and after falling in love with Poe's music in particular, it was very easy to feel sympathetic towards the different layers of the story, Mark and Anne, their parents, and finally myself. Indeed, in the end this story was for me

haha the first secondary source is from my english teacher. hes so obsessed with HOL

Just started the book. Saving this for later!

NINE DAYS TO OPEN YOUR NIGHT MIND

Some of these themes are explored in Victor Pelevin's short novel, The Helmet of Horror. They seem to complement each other nicely especially about the use of multiple narrators, the Labyrinth or Hell, and the Minotaur.

loved this!! do a bookshelf tour, pleaaaaase

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and the links to the essays in this video. I finished reading House of Leaves for the first time yesterday. It took me three weeks. My strategy for navigating the labyrinth was to read mostly both the Record (with Zampoano's footnotes) and Johnny's narrative side by side. But within a chapter, I would sometimes focus on one and then go back to catch up on the other. But I would read finish both before I went to the next part. I did follow some of the suggestions to go back to the Appendices, so I did not read it totally from front to back. I also read Tom's story out of order, following another suggestion from the "editor". I really loved this novel and the whole experience of it.

I found heard about this book when it was starting to become a cult classic (phenomenon?) from a friend. I found it while I was waiting in a train station a few months later and read it over the course of like two months- the longest it’s taken me to read anything other than a highly annotated translation of The Divine Comedy. And it’s one of my all time favorite books, but it absolutely messed me up.

What fascinates me about the Minotaur you mentioned is that all of the concrete text in HoL referring to the legend seem to have been excised (or attempted to be excised). Who is striking out this text? The editors, Johnny or zampano? Is it Denial, a refusal to acknowledge the existence of the monster? Is the father and son story in the mythology given there based on Mzd's relationship with his father ( as I mentioned in my previous post?) Somehow related? Rhetorical questions.

9:57 I perceived Johny as the minotaur, the scratch is the leitmotif associated with the incident which got his step dad to beat the shit out of him.

Awesome video. Very informative.

Great review. Reading it now.

Jorge Luis Borges fictions are a good primer for House of Leaves.

Awesome video

I think the ending of book with the unraveling of the house. Is Will's Stoping of his drive and thus the walls and the labyrinth stared unraveling. That's why his wife could rescue him. I also think it is the best portrail of obsession.

My first thought on reading the title of this video: 'Good fucking luck.'

Great guide Bookchem! Please review The Fifty Year Sword soon :)

I am always upset when people admit they didn’t read the “foot notes” 😩

Just gotta say that shirt is so cool

I was very disappointed in the book because Karen not even once asks to speak to the manager ...

I wish I could get deeper into it but mostly I think this book is Over Rated.

I hated the main.protagonist with a passion and groaned every time his narrative thread interrupted the house elements. It was basically a catalogue of tedious explicit but meaningless mysoginistic sexual conquests and irrelevant stuff about ships and dogs. And the weird formatting, blocks cut out of the middle of pages, pages with one word on them, pages of lists of irrelevant names or building terms seemed pointless filler. Maybe I’m stupid - I just didn’t get a lot of the extraneous stuff - it’s relevance or meaning. This could easily have been three hundred pages shorter and lost nothing.

The fact that this book comes up so often is kind of astounding to me. Last month I saw it featured in a TBR video where the reader said that she had already DNF'd it once, and was going to try again before the end of the year. Earlier this week I saw a post on r/books which hypothesized that Karen was Johnny's mother, Zampano his father. And tonight I read an essay which used HoL as the basis for a fairly unconvincing argument (citing some of the same spots in the text as the Hayles essay you mention in this video) that a philosophical nihilism underlies all texts. Don't get me wrong. I thought HoL was fine... but I plead incomprehension at why _this_ book should inspire so much interest in criticism. In the video, you suggest that HoL would have been a masterpiece even without all the weird ergodic literature stuff. I suggest that it would have been closer to a masterpiece _but for_ some of that stuff having been left in. To be more precise, my complaints aren't directed at the actual Navidson Record, or Johnny's strange interjections, but rather at Zampano's "critique" of the Navidson Record. I think Danielewski takes a liberty with this portion of the book, at times going as far as including lists of every architect and building he could name (pg 121), or even including a list of things _not_ found in the house. I'm reminded here of the introduction to John Barth's "The Literature of Exhaustion", in which he describes some of the laughable products available from the Something Else Press including the _Anecdoted Typography of Chance_ which is "on the surface" a list of all the objects that happen to be on the author's table, but is "in fact ... a cosmology of the author's existence." "I suppose the distinction is between things worth remarking and things worth doing," quips Barth a little further on. Perhaps this is a distinction that Danielewski could have taken note of as well.

Why do you think it is post-postmodern novel?

I've tried 3 times. I WILL finish this book!

I think what you describe is a surface level reading. The real story is only told by finding which of the 3 writers you think truly wrote the story (in universe)... Zampano, Johnny, or Pelafina ... Examining the possibility of who wrote the story and why... reveals far richer themes than what you discuss here.

House of Leaves! Horror Trauma Falling and Being Lost, maybe the pandemic became part of the terror, looking at the past and future, confusion. The end depends on your approach to life

❤❤❤❤❤

I think this book in the.begining is to break you do do.you understand it

Did you do that to your hair on purpose?

I listened to half an hour of the free audiobook on RU-vid. Hated the protagonist. Gave the channel a LIKE and moved on with my life.

I strongly recommend watching Night Mind's videos on the book... they're really long, but so worth it, and dig into the story far more deeply than this guy does

I just couldn't get into House of Leaves at all. I tried but I just couldn't. I got to a point and I said "Nope, that's it. I'm out." The Familiar vol. 1 on the other hand I'm flying through. Probably because it really does feel like reading a TV mini series and Volume 1 is the pilot episode, giving us a run down of the cast, a bit of the central plot and then it takes off at a speedy clip from there. HoL tries to do way too much and it kind of lost me in its pretentiousness. The Familiar is a much more accessible book imho

Was great to hear your in-depths view of HoL even though I don't think the novel earns it. I disagree that the books earns its experimental formatting. For me the book worked more on the level of nostalgia as a piece of fiction of its time (early Information Age) -- I remember all the mystery surrounding HoL when it was released - I think it has aged poorly and found the Johnny Truant bits barely readable.

Clickbait. the word you are looking for is "Clickbait". Thanks for the links.

I skipped the JT segments entirely.