Mark Z. Danielewski, son of a film director who co-founded the Sundance Film Festival, grew up in Utah, is in his mid-thirties and was educated at Harvard, where he was taught by Harold Bloom. He attended the most prestigious film school in America at the University of Southern California and has written a number of screenplays. His sister, Poe, is a cult rock star in the States.
Johnny Truant wild and troubled sometime employee in a LA tattoo parlour, finds a notebook kept by Zampano, a reclusive old man found dead in a cluttered apartment. Herein is the heavily annotated story of the Navidson Report.
Will Navidson, a photojournalist, and his family move into a new house. What happens next is recorded on videotapes and in interviews. Now the Navidsons are household names. Zampano, writing on loose sheets, stained napkins, crammed notebooks, has compiled what must be the definitive work on the events on Ash Tree Lane.
But Johnny Truant has never heard of the Navidson Record. Nor has anyone else he knows. And the more he reads about Will Navidson’s house, the more frightened he becomes. Paranoia besets him. The worst part is that he can’t just dismiss the notebook as the ramblings of a crazy old man. He’s starting to notice things changing around him . . .
Immensely imaginative. Impossible to put down. Impossible to forget. House of Leaves is thrilling, terrifying and unlike anything you have ever read before.
Johnny Truant, wild and troubled sometime employee in an L.A. tattoo parlour, finds a notebook kept by Zampan, a reclusive old man found dead in a cluttered apartment. Herein is the heavily annotated story of the Navidson Record.
Will Navidson, a photojournalist, and his family move into a new house. What happens next is recorded on videotapes and in interviews. Now the Navidsons are household names. Zampan, writing on loose sheets, stained napkins, crammed notebooks, has compiled what must be the definitive work on the events on Ash Tree Lane.
But Johnny Truant has never heard of the Navidson Record. Nor has anyone else he knows. And the more he reads about Will Navidson’s house, the more frightened he becomes. Paranoia besets him. The worst part is that he can’t just dismiss the notebook as the ramblings of a crazy old man. He’s starting to notice things changing around him…
Immensely imaginative. Impossible to put down. Impossible to forget. House of Leaves is thrilling, terrifying and unlike anything you have ever read before.
The cult classic. A great novel. A phenomenal debut. Thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy, distresingly scary, breathtakingly intelligent – it renders most other fiction meaningless. One can imagine Pynchon and Ballard and Stephen King and David Foster Wallace bowing at Mark’s feet, choking with astonishment, surprise, laughter and awe. I feel privileged to be among its first readers. Will I ever recover? Genre-defying . . . a novel in which something is always lurking just out of sight . . . at once a genuinely scary chiller, a satire on the business of criticism and a meditation on the way we read. This demonically brilliant book is impossible to ignore, put down or persuasively conclude reading. In fact, when you purchase your copy you may reach a certain page and find me there, reduced in size like Vincent Price in The Fly, still trapped in the web of its malicious, beautiful pages. Superbly inventive . . . a rare debut: genuinely exciting. There is a core of dark power in House of Leaves and a sense of return to the great dark matter of American literature: the haunted houses of Hawthorne, Poe and Lovecraft . . . one of the few fictions genuinely to approach the nightmarish.