Haunting House

“Losing the possibility of something is the exact same thing as losing hope and without hope nothing can survive.” Truth.

59.12 House of Leaves

Another reviewer on Goodread’s said it best, “I think it’s a really great story. However, House of Leaves is the perfect definition of bullshit.”

He goes on to say:

“This book looks at you with this smug fucking smile on it’s face, daring you to say that you don’t like it, knowing that masses of people are going to go along with it because they don’t want to look stupid. That’s what this is. It’s the fucking Radiohead of books.”

His review has 542 likes, and you can add me to the chorus.

This book came up over and over on lists of scary books to read for Halloween.  I read the description a few times but just thought it didn’t sound like my thing. But it was everywhere and so I finally succumbed.

This is a story within a story.  A found book, about a movie, that has been edited by a dead man, and is now being read by a man falling slowly into insanity.  At the core is a house and that house is a maze.  See – already it is annoying right?  But add the many footnotes (most wrong), the backwards printing, the upside-down single words on a page, and it becomes almost smug.  I loved the main story line of the family living in this house that keeps altering itself, and did find parts of it truly scary.  I even loved a lot of the information added by Zampano, and in the beginning I felt for Johnny, but by the end I was exhausted by it all because it started to constantly remind me that it wasn’t a story, it was a grand experiment. Sometimes simple is better.

I think the whole point is that you can’t count on anything.  Not the characters you read, or the footnotes they make.  The person you marry, or the house you live in. The love of a mother for her son.  And sadly, not even the book in your hands being everything that other people have told you it could be.