Book Review: House of Leaves

To all you multi-taskers out there, here's so you can listen to my ramblings. Enjoy!

I finally finished reading House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski and my eyes are crusted with dried tears. I quickly logged into my Goodreads account and rated it a full five stars and clicked on “Read”. Naturally, I checked out the book's page to read the comments to see if anyone shared the same thoughts as I had. There was one whom thought about it highly and I agreed with the comment by clicking the “Like” button. But then I saw a whole lot of other people's ratings on the book and calling it names, like “bullshit” and long paragraphs of how the book was pretentiously written. So now, I'm sitting down here before I lose this feeling and write about how I felt and these are my honest opinions that are my own, not owing at all to anyone else.

 

It's true, when I first glanced through the pages of the book, in my head was “Oh, great. What have I gotten myself into?” and “He [Danielewski] could either be really smart or a real asshole.” My apologies to him for thinking like so, if he ever reads this. I didn't read it through the first time I got the book and I let it marinate in my bookshelf for about half a year before I took it seriously. I only entertained thinner books (have you seen the size of House of Leaves? It was thick enough to be my pillow!) and non-fiction books because I was teaching within those months and I had to refresh my memory of what I've learnt in college to teach these foundation kids. Anyway, he used a lot of big words so when I finally decided to commit to it, I always kept my Mac nearby and the Dictionary app on standby. Johnny Truant, being a tattoo artist – in-training, no less – I kept wondering how could he use such big words? He's not a scholar – or so I thought, shame on me when I reached the final quarter of the book – and his life was pretty much a flimsy thing. No commitments, seemingly no future. He's got a crush on a prostitute whose name he didn't even know.

So I had to take a break once in while to straighten up. Sometimes those breaks lasted for more than a week, but if there is one thing I've learnt as a writer and a reader, nothing is appreciated more than to have your story be heard from the beginning to the end because if you give these writers a chance to voice out, you might find something spectacular. So within those breaks, I tend to coax myself to continue reading by getting to know the author. I clicked on videos of interviews that he did and once I heard him speak, somehow my doubts about this book being a pompous excuse for literature was gone. I thought to myself that it was not about the things that he put in there to make us see, but the things that he made us felt – note about my weeping session from the first paragraph, will be explained later – and I decided to trust it in his work that he had left something in there for us to discover.

Once again, I found myself immersed in the text, probably in the way of an excited child looking through an atlas. I flipped the book around, rummaged my bag for a pocket mirror, laughed at Tom's story, and cried in reminiscence of my own experiences of love and lost. Again, I had to take breaks because of fear; being in the horror genre, of course it would play around one's fear but I never thought that it would pull me in so deep. For some time, I was afraid of going back to those pages. I was so scared of feeling lost, but curiosity always had a way of inviting man back into the abyss.

I read on, indifferently. It was just a book, right? The whole thing could have not happened at all in reality, so why should I be so worked up about it anyway?

Wrong.

There are connections in the words. In every experience of Navidson, Karen, Johnny, or even the kids, we all had something in common with these characters. Regardless of truth of the facts, their emotions were real – their happiness, sadness, frustration, fears. We all have experiences in that and hence the subject of fear in this tome is laid out from my point of view as follows:

“The strongest fear and the greatest pain always come from the one that we love.”

Not to say that all love should induce pain and suffering and fear, but it comes as a way of knowing that we truly love someone or something, even a small grain of sand could hurt us. They could hurt us without being aware about it. We hurt and suffer and fear because we love, but it is only the most natural thing to do and we keep on at it. There is nothing wrong with continuously loving each other because sometimes the pain is needed to remind ourselves of how to appreciate one another. A great story is challenged with great ordeals, etc.

So if you ask me, is House of Leaves really a horror novel? I would say, yes. It is the greatest fear of them all, the one that's invited yet remains unseen, because compared to this, supernatural monsters are nothing. Keep your heart open and even the most cowardly of beings can turn around and become a horror-junkie.

Well, maybe not a horror-junkie, but one who is brave enough to face through their daily monsters and still stand strong.

And is the House of Leaves a love story (as stated by a fellow reader)? Yes. That is the “monster” in this book and yet we valiant ones tame them everyday.

As a closing, I would like to state just how much I enjoyed reading this book. It was a really amazing journey for me and it broke the walls that have kept me in fear, besides from reminding me the joys of reading “physical” books, for one thing you cannot sleep with your e-book reader without worrying that it might get crushed – or maybe it is just me because I'm a wild sleeper. If I ever get to meet the author, I would say, Mr Danielewski, thank you so much for the experience. It was the craziest mind-f*** I've read so far, but hey it's a healthy dose of it. Maybe I haven't read as much as other people, but I would say that this is the first time that I've laughed, cried, felt scared enough to check what's behind me whilst I read, got frustrated, and just downright emotional in just one book. I got goosebumps and cried at the end of Blatty's The Exorcist, but I couldn't check the “All of the above” box for that one.

Now that everything's been said, if you would excuse me now, I'm going book-hunting.