Tom has been left at the top of the stairs with a radio and a tent, while his twin brother and a friend go down into the dark to look for men who have not come back. For two days the radio gives him nothing but static. So he talks to it. He tells the old joke about the red shirt and the brown trousers, makes up a “Mr. Monster” to keep him company, throws the shapes of animals onto the tent wall with his hands and argues, politely, with whatever is listening. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski has a reputation as a puzzle box, a book of footnotes and upside-down pages, but this lonely, stoned, funny man keeping his nerve with bad jokes is closer to what it is really about.
The House Is a Marriage in Trouble
The story inside the story concerns Will Navidson, a famous war photographer, and Karen Green, the former model he has never quite married, who move with their two children to rural Virginia to save their relationship. Navidson plans to film the ordinary process of settling in, with motion-triggered cameras in every room, and the early pages of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski let that cosy footage of unpacked crates, lemonade on the porch and children making candles run just long enough for the loss of it to hurt. Instead a door appears where there should be none, and then a black passage opens in the living room, cold enough to see your breath in, leading somewhere the exterior of the house cannot contain.
What makes the haunting work is that it pulls exactly on the threads already fraying. Navidson has spent a career walking towards danger, and the passage is the most irresistible assignment he has ever been offered. Karen is crippled by a fear of enclosed spaces, a condition the novel treats with real seriousness (the NHS has a clear guide to claustrophobia and its symptoms), and she makes him promise not to go in. One of the best early moments is quietly domestic: Karen builds a bookshelf with a friend, pulls out a photo album, and the books slide neatly against the wall. Weeks later someone pulls another volume, and this time they fall to the floor, because the shelf no longer reaches.
The brothers give the book its warmth. Tom, the drifter who builds houses and smokes too much, and Navidson, the high achiever who never calls, have barely spoken in eight years. The impossible house gets them in a car together, and the novel lets that reconciliation matter as much as anything waiting downstairs. Billy Reston, an engineer friend who uses a wheelchair and refuses to be pitied, completes the household, hauling himself up the stairs on his arms rather than accept a lift, and his gruff loyalty becomes one of the quiet pleasures of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. The children, Chad and Daisy, are drawn with unusual care too. They treat the strange new closet as a playground long before the adults admit to being afraid of it, and the book is sharp about how quickly a frightened house stops noticing the small people inside it.
What Mark Z. Danielewski Hides in the Footnotes
All of this reaches the reader secondhand, through the manuscript of Zampanò, a blind old writer found dead in a sealed Hollywood apartment, and then through Johnny Truant, the young tattoo apprentice who takes the papers home and starts typing them up. His notes begin as wisecracks and pick-up stories. They turn into something much darker. In one of the most frightening passages anywhere in House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, Johnny goes to fetch ink from the shop’s storeroom, the bulb blows, and in the dark he is certain something with long fingers and red eyes is unfolding from the corner. He tumbles down the stairs covered in black ink and finds a scratch on his neck no one can explain.
Johnny is a confession that keeps lying and then correcting itself. He invents tall tales about his scars, admits to altering the manuscript, and slowly lets the truth about his childhood leak through: a father dead in a crash, foster homes, and a mother in a psychiatric institute. Her letters, gathered at the back, are the book’s emotional centre, tender, brilliant and finally devastating, and the moment when they rewrite what Johnny believes about his own past lands harder than any monster.
The cost of this design is real, and readers should know it going in. Zampanò’s study is a parody of academic criticism, crammed with invented scholars and long essays on echoes, mazes and myth; it is often witty and, by intention, often tedious, and the untranslated foreign passages test anyone’s patience. Johnny’s sexual escapades fill pages that add little except a sense of a young man performing for himself. The novel also carries graphic violence, suicide, abuse and addiction, which are not marginal to it. Taken together, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski asks for a commitment that only some readers will think it repays.
Where Mark Z. Danielewski Found His Labyrinth
Mark Z. Danielewski was born in 1966 in New York, the son of Tad Danielewski, a Polish avant-garde film director whose work moved the family through six countries before Mark turned ten, until they settled in Provo, Utah. At Yale, where he graduated in English in 1988, he studied under the poet and critic John Hollander, and readers of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski will notice that Zampanò’s long chapter on echoes lingers over Hollander’s own book on the subject and even catches it misquoting Wordsworth.
He later went to film school in Los Angeles and worked as a sound man and assistant editor on a documentary about the philosopher Jacques Derrida, whose ideas about centres and structures turn up inside the labyrinth. The novel came out in 2000 and found its audience slowly, by word of mouth. In 2013 Stephen King and his son Joe Hill, debating in a New York Times conversation which novel deserved to be called the Moby-Dick of horror, settled on this one. A slim companion volume, The Whalestoe Letters, collects the mother’s correspondence.
After the Last Page
The mock scholarship outstays its welcome and the narrator’s excesses grate, yet House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski earns its cult. Its horrors are built from absence, cold and distance, and its tenderness comes from people trying to reach each other through all three.
Readers who want more stories narrated by someone who may not be telling the truth should go back to The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, the great ancestor of the unreliable haunted narrative. The October Film Haunt by Michael Wehunt picks up the idea of horror that lives inside found footage, and The No-End House by Jeremy Bates offers a lighter, faster descent through rooms that keep going. Johnny warns at the very start that this book will not let its readers sleep easily. For the patient ones, that is the attraction.