Finally got around to reading house of leaves and this book has got me absolutely floored, seriously one of the best pieces of literature I think I’ve ever read. Gives you so much to think about, it’s beautifully haunting and the way it plays with narrative structure is so damn interesting.
I’d seriously recommend this book to anyone (despite the books dedication being “this is not for you”). It’s a bit of a deep dive but it really pays off to read every single footnote, appendix, flip around when directed to, and lose yourself in the mystery of the book
I wish I could agree. After reading so much hype about it on here and other places I finally paid the heavy price for it on eBay a few years ago.
Absolutely loathed it, just about everything about. Could barely get past 100 hundred pages.
I feel like I can’t give a full review because I barely even got more than a quarter way into it. But I feel so strongly about what I did read I’m going to anyway.
Straight off the bat I really disliked how kind of flimsy and almost tumblr/blog post esque the narrative is written. Comes off amateurish and really cringey.
Which I guess does fit with the fact that the main character is exactly that snd so much more. Hated everything about the protagonist, found the attempts to humanise him and then glorify his punk/‘sexy women banging’ lifestyle head bangingly stupid.
Was not at all impressed by the attempts to build tension or what I think was meant to be some form of fear. Was again cheap and amateurish.
The writers inability to write anything close to a human or relatable character on top of their inability to understand what actually is and isn’t effective scare/horror writing made the book impossible for me to continue. Frankly the whole thing angered me, and even just flipping through the cheap editing trick sections I had zero interest in continuing you it to make it to that section.
Total flop in almost every sense. Made me feel like a grumpy old man wincing at what the new generation think is good quality content… yet Im almost 30 years younger than the author.
I think you’re not supposed to like (much less identify with) Johnny Truant. Or Zampano, or Will Navidson. It’s basically a long exercise in unreliable narrators on multiple levels, and I think it would be fair to call it a bit of a metafictional wankfest (I say this with nothing but love). I don’t think that enjoying the story on its own merits is really the point - what he’s going for is that you enjoy the way the story is being told. If that doesn’t work for you (and for many people it won’t) then the book really has nothing else to offer you, I think.
The footnote style gimmick gets super annoying after a couple pages, and that is the only thing that stands out about the book.