For those who love a little mystery, a little psychological horror, and a little weirdness in life.
If you have not read the novel. I suggest you stop here, grab a copy, and start reading. After all, House of Leaves is not merely a novel: it’s an experience. Maximum enjoyment of any experience requires being spoiled as little as possible.
If you’ve finished the book or really really don’t care about spoilers, read on. I promise Easter eggs at the end!
On [Insert month and date] of [Insert year], you took possession of a book named House of Leaves. At first glance, it’s a book like any other: nice, blocky, and hefty. But soon you discovered something awkward about the book: the front cover’s just a bit smaller than the pages. You took out your measuring tape. The difference measured 3/4 inches exactly. You’re intrigued, you started reading, and your world changed forever…
…
Oops, wait… Wrong draft.
…
Here it is.
On January 6th of 1997, a blind old man died in his apartment. A week later, one of his neighbors brought a friend over to look at the old man’s place. Among the old man’s belongings, they found paper of all kinds covered with scribblings of words and symbols. The old man had no next of kin. So the friend took the papers home with him. The old man’s name was Zampano. The friend’s name was Johnny Truant. The papers were manuscript for a book named The Navidson Records.
For most of House of Leaves, we’re told two stories simultaneously. One’s of Truant, born in 1971 and living a libertine lifestyle in LA while reading and organizing the manuscript for The Navidson Records. The other’s The Navidson Records, a pseudo-documentary recording Will Navidson, his family and friends, and their encounter with an entity known throughout the Record as the house.
To be perfectly honest, I went into House of Leaves blind and didn’t know what to expect. I read it like a normal person with a normal book at first — page after page after page. Then Truant’s footnotes began to take on a life of its own. Tales of his sexapades went from the bawdy companion of Navidson exegesis to overshadowing it. The transitions from pseudo-academia to erotica were so abrupt they gave me whiplash. The interruptions also meant I had to read back just to understand the Navidson storyline.
I admit I enjoyed the Navidson storyline better than Truant’s (perhaps the norm among first-time readers). Adrenaline-fueled exploration of your possibly malevolent, bigger on the inside house was a better story than drug-fueled delusionary ramblings. But as the novel drew to a close, I realized Truant’s story was a lot more intriguing.
If you’ve read the book, you know how Navidson’s story ended. Will survived his ordeal and reunited with Karen and his children. Of Navidson’s family and friends, the only one with a somewhat ambiguous ending was Tom. He disappeared into the house and was never heard from again. (I believe he died from his injuries.)
Truant, however, remained an enigma to the end. He was a consummate liar, constantly spinning up fantastical tales of his life and only sometimes admitting to making them up. His stories were inconsistent. His immense popularity with Zampano’s girls existed, almost certainly, solely in his head, given his abysmal track record with non-Zampano’s girls. Even when he’s not actively trying to deceive, his memories had the tendency of being distorted by drugs and trauma. He’s so unreliable that even stories corroborated by his mother’s letters could be made up.
His stories were the puzzles of the novel.
Was he merely reader and the first editor of the Record as he claimed? Or was he the actual author? His adventures ended beneath an ash tree. The attentive reader might recall that the house was on Ash Tree Lane. Could this be the ash tree that inspired the entire Record? Could he have made up Zampano and Lude? If that’s the case, why would he do that?
Compared to Truant, Navidson was remarkably straightforward. His relationships, his past, and his guilt were all explored and analyzed in detail. The one great mystery of Navidson’s story was the house, the unexplainable, ineffable house.
What was the house?
At the beginning I thought it was an evil version of TARDIS (think TARDIS after being taken over by House). But it lacked the proactiveness of an evil entity. It’s more… indifferent. It fed on the mental state of its occupants and fueled it.
Holloway desired glory and fame from discovering a monster, and the house fed on his desire and twisted his mind until he ended up shooting his compatriots and committing suicide. Even the house becoming violent and killing Tom could be a sort of manifestation of Holloway’s more violent psyche.
Navidson, on the other hand, went in trying to learn more about the house. So the house led him to the house within the house, presumably the ‘heart’ of the entity.
Karen returned to the house and overcame her phobia for Navidson. The house relinquished Navidson to her.
Some Criticism
If there’s one small complaint I have regarding the plot of the novel, it would be about the ending of the Record.
Navidson finding what he sought was something the novel had built toward, as was the unsatisfying discovery, as, I think, was his eventual demise…
Navidson had been suicidal. He had lost hope. He spent twenty-five days1 in free-fall, being exposed to the elements with very little food and water. By common sense and by trajectory of the plot, Navidson should have died. It’s the writings on the wall! Yet he survived in a place that, as far as I know, didn’t warp time and didn’t sustain life. Remember, the house took and consumed and erased. But for some reason, it didn’t erase Navidson. I find that out of character.
Unless… Navidson’s survival is supposed to tell us something about the author of the Record. A romantic streak of the author perhaps. Maybe it’s a clue to the author’s secret identity…
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There are two things I love about House of Leaves. The first is its open-endedness. Instead of clear answers, we get a wealth of information and countless ‘side quests.’ It’s up to the reader to decide if they’re superfluous or the foundation to develop their own theories about the Record and House of Leaves.
The other would be its unique formatting. To date, I have yet to read another printed book with its text upside down, sideways, in a spiral… For me, theses formatting choices add to the reading experience. The disorientating textual layout illustrated the disorientation experienced by Navidson while exploring the house and by Pelafina during her psychosis. I especially like the sparse layout for the exploration sections. Pages flew by as I pursued the story. And just like how time always seems to pass differently in a high-stress situation, the reading experience was altered for the action-packed scenes.
–
Footnote:
- Navidson started his Exploration #5 on April 1st. Karen returned to the house on April 9th and found Navidson barely alive on May 10th. We know that Navidson reached the edge of the house on April 12th or 13th. On April 13th or 14th, he entered the ‘house in a house‘ with a small portion of food (Navidson started the exploration with 2 weeks worth of rations) and 2 containers of water. On April 14th or 15th, he entered the room with a window and began falling. So by the time he’s rescued, he’d been falling for 25 days straight. ↩︎
Appendix
Timeline of Exploration #4:
| Date | Holloway and crew | Navidson and Reston | Tom |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 1 | Went down the staircase | ||
| Day 2 | Went down the staircase | ||
| Day 3 | Went down the staircase | ||
| Day 4 | Explored and returned to staircase | ||
| Day 5 | Climbed up the staircase | ||
| Day 6 | Discovered the destroyed marker and cache; Holloway went off alone | ||
| Day 7 | Holloway shot Wax by accident then tried to murder Jed and Wax | Entered the labyrinth to rescue Holloway and crew | Manned the radio |
| Day 8 | Jed and Wax were lost in the labyrinth; Holloway hunted them | Went down the staircase | Manned the radio |
| Day 9 | Jed and Wax were found by Navidson and Reston; Jed was killed by Holloway | Found Jed and Wax; Reston, Jed, and Wax were evacuated | Participated in the evacuation |
| Day 10 | Holloway shot himself in the chest | ||
| Day 11 | |||
| Day 12 | |||
| Day 13 | |||
| Day 14 | Navidson escaped the labyrinth |
Truant’s timeline:
| Date | Summary | Page |
|---|---|---|
| 1996 | ||
| November | Lude and Truant got high and had a string of one-night stands for a month | 262 |
| December | The Pekinese story | 265 |
| 1997 | ||
| January 6 | Zampanò died | — |
| January 15 | Truant took possession of Zampanò’s work | — |
| Unknown | Truant’s story | 12 |
| Late March | Truant’s note | 19 |
| Unknown | Truant’s story | 25 |
| Unknown | Truant’s note | 31 |
| Unknown | Truant’s story | 34 |
| Unknown | Truant’s note | 42 |
| Unknown | Truant’s note | 48 |
| Unknown | Truant met Thumper four months ago | 50 |
| Unknown | Truant’s story | 55 |
| Unknown | Truant’s storeroom breakdown | 69 |
| Unknown | Truant’s story | 76 |
| Unknown | Truant’s encounter with Kyrie, whom he met five or so months before | 87 |
| Unknown | Truant’s story | 99 |
| Before June 21 | Truant’s story | 103 |
| Unknown | Truant’s mental breakdown as he left his apartment | 107 |
| Unknown | Truant’s story | 115 |
| Unknown | Truant’s story | 128 |
| Unknown | Truant’s note | 144 |
| June 21 | Truant’s birthday; story about Hailey | 149 |
| July 4 | Truant went to a psychiatrist a few days ago | 179 |
| Unknown | Truant’s story | 248 |
| Unknown | Truant’s story | 261 |
| Mid-August | Truant had not been to work for three weeks; recalled Tex’s story | 296 |
| Mid-September | Lude checked on Truant, who was holed up in his apartment without electricity | 323 |
| Unknown | Truant’s note | 336 |
| October | Kyrie’s boyfriend returned to town | 348 |
| Unknown | Truant’s note | 350 |
| After Thanksgiving | Thumper called Truant | 365 |
| Unknown | Truant got two guns | 379 |
| 1998 | ||
| New Year’s Day | Truant’s Minotaur dream; bumped into Kyrie again | 403 |
| End of March | Truant was evicted and headed to Virginia; visited Lude in the hospital | 410 |
| May 1 – July 1 | Truant searched for the house and went down memory lane | 499 |
| August | Lude died | 491 |
| September 2–28 | Truant lost memory of the entire month | 509 |
| September 29 | Truant in Los Gatos | 509 |
| October 19 | Truant returned to Los Angeles | 510 |
| October 24 | Truant called Thumper and was invited over | 510 |
| October 25 | Truant wrote about Lude’s death and suffered a mental breakdown in his hotel room | 491 |
| October 27 | Truant was sleeping under benches | 495 |
| October 29 | Kyrie and her boyfriend found Truant; boyfriend beat him up; Truant killed him | 495 |
| October 30 | Truant recalled his earlier trip | 497 |
| October 31 | Wrote the Introduction letter; remembered his mother leaving for the asylum | 515 |
| November 11 | Truant left Los Angeles by bus | 510 |
| 1999 | ||
| February 13 | Hailey’s letter mentioning Truant’s disappearance | 151 |
| August 28 | Truant in Flagstaff, Arizona; befriended a band who read House of Leaves | 512 |
