Why I Love House of Leaves

The second half of this video does a good job detailing the horrifying power of House of Leaves, an excellent frame story and meta-text with extensive footnotes that facilitate the storyline. Each frame in the densely layered text offers frightening commentary on what is presumably a fictional story the protagonist, Johnny Truant discovers, and as he gradually reads more and more of the text, we lose sense of the protagonist's sanity, since he gradually loses himself in the story of a family, the Navidsons, living in a house that appears to be dimensionally transcendantal, with a passageway to an infinitely large space inside the home, expanding and contracting. Thus, Danielewski provides two entwined stories of burgeoning horror as Truant and the presumably fictional characters he reads about each face impending psychological and physical trauma. Truant's characters adds additional notes, telling his own story which becomes, to quote this video, "more and more warped" and offers an astounding example of post-modern fiction incorporating meta-fictional styles and revealing how blurry the division between fiction and reality can be in literature. As a fan of frame stories, such as the legendary Arabian Knights, for instance, I devoured this psychological thriller where, as the video states, the loss of control (whether it is Truant's own life, plunging further and further into the abyss of his psyche, or the Navidsons descending deeper and deeper into physical darkness and death in the endless maze of the hidden black passageway) provides an unseating, fearful experience for the reader who enters into the world of these characters. Although I have read House of Leaves twice, I would love to re-read it perpetually and write a future post wherein I engage in deeper analysis on the brilliant novel with its deeper mathematical, psychological, and philosophical themes. In addition, perhaps another reason I enjoy this so much is due to my affinity for writers willing to engage literary texts with footnotes, notes, and other traditionally uncommon devices and non-literary styles, since Patrick Chamoiseau, Ishmael Reed, and even Junot Diaz have also written similarly structured texts.