At the heart of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is a wonderfully creepy ghost story, a Blair Witch-like exploration of a terrifyingly incomprehensible house that recalls the best of H.P. Lovecraft. But Danielewski dresses up the story with so much literary tomfoolery that the novel begins to stagger under the weight of his fun and games.

Let's start with a brief description of the multiple levels of narrative in House of Leaves. Danielewski is the author of the book. He's written the book from the point of view of Johnny Truant. Truant, aside from occasionally telling his own story, mostly just reproduces (and heavily annotates) the notes and diaries that he found in the room of a dead man named Zampano. Zampano's materials describe and analyze a famous film, The Navidson Record. The Navidson Record is a documentary about the terrifying adventures of the Navidson family when they realize that there is something unsettling about their new country home.

It gets more complicated. Johnny Truant is clearly a fictional character in our world. Truant knows Zampano (or at least he thinks he does). But Truant can't find anything in his fictional world about The Navidson Record or the Navidson family. So Danielewski is writing a fictional narrative (House of Leaves) about a man who writes a truthful narrative (Truant's essays) about a man who writes a fictional narrative (Zampano's notes on The Navidson Record).

Got it? Good. Because one of the points of this book is that the line between fiction and reality is blurred. Zampano's fiction bleeds into Truant's reality; and Truant's reality, in a sense, bleeds into ours, by warping the words on the page (and, frankly, by creeping us out).

The real emotive core of the story--and the only thing resembling a coherent plot--is the innermost nestled plot thread about the Navidson family moving into their new country home. It is, as I said earlier, an intensely creepy story. The Navidson family has moved into a new house to get away from the daily grind. But one day they make an unnerving discovery: the inside of the house is ever so slightly larger than the outside. Then one day the Navidson children discover a mysterious door that seems to open into a dark, empty space that should not exist. Heebie-jeebies result.

The horror story surrounding the Navidsons is superbly plotted. It's a tale of psychological, not physical, horror, the best modern interpretation of H.P. Lovecraft's terrifying, unearthly geometries.

There is also an uninspiring, higher-level story about Johnny Truant and his descent into madness. Basically all that Truant does is (1) get involved with extremely attractive women, in a kind of weird wish fulfillment for Danielewski; (2) tell us how amazingly scared he is, without actually showing us anything scary.

Then we come to the games. Let's start with the bullshit mythos that Danielewski has created around his book. According to the normally reliable bibliographic information, this is the second edition of House of Leaves; the first edition was passed around as looseleaf pages among a small underground band of true believers. This is, of course, entirely hogwash: part of this book's funky bleeding between fiction and reality.

The other major piece of funkiness in this book is the formatting. House of Leaves is experimental fiction: some of the pages contain only one line or some sort of word art; others have footnotes that run on the margins of the page; and colored and multi-sized text pops up here and there. Some of the formatting is actually pretty effective, particularly when Danielewski/Truant paces the text to match the mood of the narrative. Other times, I couldn't quite tell what the hell Danielewski was trying to do, and the funky formatting just got in the way.

But finally we come to the codes. House of Leaves is crammed with codes, most of them of a single fairly simple type: the first letters of a long stream of words makes up some message. It's in the novel's codes that most of its weirdness is hidden: some of Zampano's footnotes contain odd references to both Navidson and Truant's world, and in one of the appendices (which you should definitely read), there is an odd letter from Truant's mother that, when decoded, tells a harrowing story of her time in a mental institution (and also, curiously, seems to be addressed to Zampano, though she was institutionalized and died before her son, Johnny, met him--perhaps Johnny Truant is a fictional creature born out of an encoded correspondence between Zampano and Mrs. Truant?).

It's all very clever. But in the end, the book's ingenuity overrides its heart. House of Leaves is quite enjoyable if you approach it not as a story, but as a puzzle box: ingeniously constructed, but ultimately empty.

Copyright © 2005 Steven Wu