House Of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
Read August and September 2003
I tried to read this one as fast as possible so that I wouldn't be able to absorb it all. I didn't want to absorb it all because I knew it would freak me out. So if I came to the end of the page and realized that my mind had been wandering so that I didn't remember anything that I had just read, I would simply go on. And if I didn't understand something too esoteric for me, I let it pass me by rather than trying to look the thing up on the internet so that I could follow the reference. I asked a friend of mine last spring I think it was what he thought was the most frightening book he ever read. He said House Of Leaves. So now that I've read it, I'll have to say the same thing, that it's the most frightening book I've ever read. Before it had been The Turn Of The Screw by either William or Henry James, whichever was the one that wasn't a psychologist. I can never remember which is which. I really liked the unique format of the book, what with the weird directional things going on with the text and other bizarre things, it really brought out the terrifying features of the ever-so-strange house. It draws the inevitable comparisons to "The Blair Witch Project," I suppose, but that's not necessarily so bad. The whole Zampanó and Johnny Truant thing goes a long way towards creating verisimilitude. And then, of course, the author's sister put out the album "Haunted" and it rocks. The cover was designed by one of my favourite book designers, Eric Fuentecilla (sp?). Ironically, at the sime time I read this book I was also reading Akhenaten: Dweller In Truth by Naguib Mahfouz, in paperback, and it also had a cover designed by this Fuentecilla guy. I've been paying a lot of attention lately to cover jacket art since reading The Cheese Monkeys a year ago. |