So I have this book, titled House of Leaves. I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Thing is, it's pretty much about going insane. As such, if you read it and really get into it like you're supposed to as a good reader, you will go insane. I'd put excerpts up, but part of the insanity is how the words are arranged on the pages, and I couldn't possibly do it on this little xanga-writer thingy, and even if M-word or OpenOffice has the ability to do it, I wouldn't know how.
I'll see whether I can't get more specific about what it's about. The introduction is written by a man named Johnny Truant who leaned about a man named Zampano (there's an accent above one of those letters) who had written (collected?) some kind of in-depth analysis of a movie, including a full description of it, beginning to end. The movie, titled "The Navidson Record," was a documentary. Sort of. It's a home movie done by a professional photographer named Will Navidson, with a couple cameras attached to motion sensors set up around their house, plus personal camcorders for him and his not-married-wife, Karen. Navidson wanted to document his family moving into their new house on Ash Tree Lane. You don't see ALL of the footage, naturally. As a photojournalist, Navidson is also a very talented video editor, so what he puts together flows very well, and he determines the story based on what he chooses to show you. Many parts of the analysis remind you of this and how it's interesting that Navidson chose to focus on this rather than that.
Wouldn't be all that intersting, but stuff happens. The family leaves the house for a little vacation, for about a week. When they come back, there's an extra room in their house. It's not a full-size room, just about the size of a walk-in closet. No windows. Just black/dark greyish walls. They call the police. You're thinking, "What the hell can the police do?" which ends up being more or less the result, but you've got to do something, right? Your house has been altered somehow, and the motion sensors on the cameras never triggered. You've now got a new room that wasn't there a week ago. You've got to do something. Still, as the police tell them, better to be attacked by a mad carpenter than a burglar.
Then, after looking at some blueprints and comparing with physical measurements he's taken, Navidson realizes something. His house is 1/4 inch larger on the inside than it is on the outside. Not a very great difference, but it has no right to exist, regardless of its size.
It gets stranger, but this is a good place to stop, mostly to let you know that the cover of the book is 1/4 inch smaller than the inside of the book.
That's another point. The book is about insanity for more reasons than it's just about this crazy movie. Remember Johnny, who wrote the introduction? Well, he also writes some footnotes for the story, as did Zampano. Many of Johnny's footnotes go on for several pages, talking about his life and how he feels like he's being stalked by something, and how everything gets steadily worse as he reads the information compiled and written by Zampano. How he's either going insane or something about what happened in "The Navidson Record" is seeping into his own life. Thing is, the way Johnny got ahold of Zampano's work is that Zampano was found dead in his appartment. There were claw marks on the floor next to him, but no blood anywhere so the police didn't think about them. It's a little strange that Zampano would write about such a thing. A film, that is. He couldn't ever have seen it. He was totally blind.
Then there's the writing that Zampano did about "The Navidson Record." There are pages with just a single word on them, or just a single letter from the middle of a word on it. There are pages where he describes Navidson walking down a staircase, and the words are arranged like a staircase. Then there are strange word arrangements that don't have anything to do with what's going on. There are mostly ordinary pages that have blue squares laid over them with more text inside them. Sometimes that text is backwards.
Then there's the word "house." It's blue. Always. On the cover in the title. In Random House on the copyright page or on the back of the cover. Everywhere, always. Even if it's in other languages. Haus.
Then there's the appendices. These have a number of strange things in them, including photographs of houses and pictures of collages and even a comic (not funny) and some other artwork. But the most distressing thing in there is a collection of letters to Johnny from his mother who was in an asylum at the time. She starts off acting very normal. Better than normal, she seems extremely intelligent. Some of her early letters I wish I had written myself. Then she starts talking about the New Director, how the kind old Director of the institution left and now there's a New Director who doesn't like her. How she's figured some things out about the world and the New Director is censoring her mail so she'll have to find an attendant to trust, because the New Director can't let her tell anyone what she knows, much less her loving son. Then she writes one in a simple code described in the previous letter. Here it is, directly de-coded.
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May 8, 1987
DearestJohnny,
Theyhavefoundawaytobreakme.Rapeafifty-sixyearoldbagofbones.Thereisnoworseanddon'tbelieveotherwise.
Theattendantsdoit.Othersdoit.Noteveryday,noteveryweek,maybenoteveneverymonth.Buttheydoit.
SomeoneIdon'tknowalwayscomes.
Whenit'sdark.Late.I'velearnednottoscream,screaminggavemehopeandunansweredhopeisshatteredhope.
ThinkofyourHaitian.Itisfarsanertochooserapethanshatterdhope.
SoIsubmitandIdrift.
Iletcapriceandacertaindegreeoffreeassociationtakemeaway.SometimesI'mstillawaylongafterit'sdone,afterhe'sgone-thesrranger,theattendant,thecustodianthejanitor,cleaningman,waitingman,dirtyMAN-thenighttidyingupafterhim.
I'minhellgivingintoheavenwhereIsometimesthinkofyourbeauptifulfatherwithhisdreamywingsandonlythendoIallowmyselftocry.
Notbecauseyourmotherwasraped(again)butbecauseshelovedsomuchwhatshecouldneverhavebeenallowedtokeep.
Suchasillygirl.
YoumustsavemeJohnny.Inthenameofyourfather.ImustescapethisplaceorIwilldie.
I love you so much.
You are all I have.
P.
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They get worse before they get better. Much worse. There's one whose first page is all a strange arrangement of "Johnny," over and over again. It was about quarter-past-five at the time I read it last night, and reading it like that, reading "Johnny" over and over agian, whispering it, it sounded almost like a chant. I was saying "Johnny," but it sounded wrong and bad to whisper it over and over agian. Between that and part of the story where Navidson nearly gets lost in his own house, you better believe I was seeing things move out of the corners of my eyes and feeling things tickling my skin and paying very special attention to every single tiny noise. When I was in bed but not asleep, with my desk light still on, there was a ladybug on the book. That's not so strange; at least one or two of them have inhabited my room since I got here. But I didn't trust this one. He might not have been very smart or very big, but given the chance, I would have bet that that ladybug would have done me in and taken my money.
It's from the "horror" section of the bookstore, and described as frightening by some of the reviews on the back, and thought some frightening things do happen in it, this book isn't really about scaring you in the typical horror-genre sense of you being afraid for the characters' sake. It's about making you honestly believe that there's something somewhere that's trying to kill you. Trying to do to you what it already tried to do to the characters. The classic-classic ghost story with all the bits implying that it could happen again because it happened exactly where you're standing. Only, not where you're standing, but to these people who read this stuff that you're reading right now. Only they don't tell you "hey this is happening to these people who read what you're reading." They don't draw any attention to the fact that you're reading what they read, at least not to imply anything. So it's much more subtle, so you don't notice it and go, "oh, it's one of those crap ghost stories." You just get really freakin' creeped out. If you don't have paranoid delusions, this book will at least help you on your way to developing some. Someone at that previously mentioned party suggested that it might be considered psychodelic literature. It's not, but close. It's insanity's version of psychodelic literature. It's insane literature. Written by the insane about the insane to be read by the insane. I doubt this book would be half as entertaining if my brain were normal.
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