Book #9
Well, I finished House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. It had a few unsettling bits. The whole concept of a house with hallways and rooms that suddenly appear and exceed the area of the actual house, intrigued me. It’s kind of a disturbing, jarring thought, that your house may not be what you think it is. Kind of like when I shut the back bedroom door for the first time, after living here a while, and found that on the opposite side of the doorknob was a doorhandle. I wanted to know what kind of story someone could make out of that sort of unsettling thing. And I still want to know, because House of Leaves is barely about that. Mostly all the good bits were shuffled into a pseudoacademic work and the free form thoughts of a druggie. Don’t even get me started on the type-face hijinks. And while I think a more hierarchical (or hypertextual) storytelling form could be interesting, this just came off as annoying. Like American Psycho, it kept me reading just to see the whole thing through.
On the plus side, Samms saw me reading it and brought me Poe’s Haunted to listen to. (Danielewski and Poe are siblings and there was some cross-marketing between the two works.) Pretty good. Much better than Hello.
The Writerly Reader 