I set one goal for myself this past month: Finish reading House of Leaves before June 10th, the 6 year anniversary of when I bought the book.
Here's a super simplified summary of the plot, so that I don't give anything away. The story is about the Navidson family (who moves into a house that's just 1/4" bigger on the inside than it is on the outside), Zampano (the man who wrote about The Navidson Record) and Johnny (who found Zampano's work and finished it for him). I'm not going to lie, for about 95% of this book, I really believed Johnny was on a bad acid trip.
I'm going to take a minute to explain how I go about writing my once-a-year posts. As I'm doing...Whatever it is that I do, I take notes. A lot of notes, actually. Looking over the notes I have saved to my phone, I was really optimistic in the beginning. Delete, delete, delete.
I've been interested in House of Leaves ever since a friend linked me to the Dionaea House story a while back. I was also drawn to the format and typography, the things that I ultimately ended up dreading most about the book the more I read it. It felt like a chore to read, as most people will tell you. Getting through those first 9 chapters is a lot of work and it makes you wonder if the payoff will be worth it. I also think my ability to enjoy a book is dependent on the weather, time of year and my overall mood. Reading House of Leaves in the middle of April, while it's warm and sunny outside and I really just want to read a light, fluffy romance novel, did not do me any favors.
On more than one occasion, I zoned out during Johnny's rambling, run-on sentences. One went on for about an entire page. I couldn't even tell you what I had read by the end of it. Page 297 was where I finally had enough and decided to skip all future run-on sentences in the footnotes. There's no sense wasting my time reading them when I have no idea what he's said by the time he stops going on and on about it. Zampano wasn't much better, his lecture on echoes caused me to stop reading the book at least three times. I much preferred the segments about The Navidson Record.
A bit of a small spoiler here, but there's an entire passage on labyrinths and how when you're inside one, you can't make sense of it because you can't see the overall picture. That's exactly how House of Leaves will make you feel while you're reading it. So if you're sitting there thinking, "What the hell does this have to do with anything, what am I missing?" Don't worry, you're supposed to feel confused and lost.
Before you even get to the introduction of the book, you're told, "This is not for you." Even though I was interested in the story, and I appreciate it and honestly think it's a work of art, and I sort of enjoyed some of it (as much as you can enjoy something that manages to frustrate the hell out of you), I agree. House of Leaves probably wasn't for me. (In my notes, it says "at this particular moment in time." Later on, I wrote, "I kept thinking, 'Maybe now just isn't the right time to read this book, maybe that's why I'm not enjoying it and I can't get into it.' But I've been trying to read this book for almost 6 years now, so if I haven't found the 'right time' by this point, it probably doesn't exist for me.") That doesn't mean it's a bad book. If you decide to pick it up and see for yourself, my advice would be to push past the first 152 pages (the same advice you'll find if you ask anyone on Reddit). If you're enjoying The Navidson Report, read that and skip the rest. If you're enjoying Johnny's seemingly random stories, just read his footnotes. If you're enjoying the book overall, but the lists that go on for pages and the incessant talk about echoes makes you want to give up, skip over those entire sections, because trust me, you won't miss anything.
I liked the idea of House of Leaves more than I liked the book itself. And I'm definitely in the minority. Every time I do a search for the scariest novels ever written, House of Leaves always makes an appearance. I think that worked against it, for me, because it was so praised and hyped up that I expected to feel an overwhelming sense of dread while reading it, and that didn't happen. I think it's also partially because all I could think was, "Please let me finally finish this book so I can move on with my life."
There's a group of people who claim this book is a love story rather than a horror novel and I 100% agree with them. If you plan on reading House of Leaves, go into it knowing that. If you don't expect too much, maybe you'll have a better experience with it than I did.
