I'ma talk about the stuff I read this year.
Like this, which is a new favorite.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, 2000
709 pages (technically speaking)
This was recommended by a friend, a published author herself. I wanted a sick book of course but also inspiration. By the time I started reading this, I'd already started much more of my own stories, and as I
LEAFED through it with unstoppable anticipation, I found that somehow my work was uncannily similar. You'd think it not possible that I didn't take any cues from it, that heavy influence is deceivingly notable. Impressive for never reading it.
I came in search of horror and boy did I find it. Visually driven stuff. Not just talking about the imagery either. The Irvine Welshian, experimental and indeterminate format reads like an ancient scroll written anonymously in a language spoken nowhere. Along the way we encounter braille and single/couple word pages that do well to increase your heart rate to match the pace at which you suspensefully flip and flip. Musical staves, margins filled with endless lists of notable and possibly some nonexistent architecture. Triangular passages residing in the corners of pages and paragraphs that quite literally fall apart like a Jenga tower.
House is madness and anguish incarnate. Starting from the inside out, it revolves around a simple but fragile and disintegrating family, exploring the ineffable qualities of a house that is larger on the inside than out. The family and affiliated friends that arrive to trek the infinite and impossible chambers within the
house are themselves the subject of a conceptual (as in nonexistent) homemade film being described in immense and imagined detail as an academic study by a conspicuously crazy and deceased blind man, who left behind his haphazard manuscript in his apartment when he died, a whole trunk full of scraps of concentrated tin foil hat-ness, whose outrageous delusions are found and assembled by a young man, ultimately the narrator if there ever was any, who also tells of his own deterioration brought upon by the discovery in scattered footnotes and brought into further light by the appendices.
Never before (and admittedly I haven't read all that much in my life until now) have I encountered such a visceral and relentless account of what it means to suffer in every way. The brutal honesty delivered by our disgruntled narrator is uncompromising, you can almost feel the pain that this book exudes.
I would readily liken this to
At the Mountains of Madness but of a modern age. What scares us is that same Lovecraftian ambiguity that is almost threatening in its perplexity and unknown-ness. The interior of the home depicted in
The Navidson Record (the central piece of
House), is reminiscent of the titanic temples of the Great Old Ones found at the Plateau of Leng. Beneath the
house is an endless void with unlimited doors and curves, spiral staircases, impossible stretches of distance, and corridors and halls that shift on their own accord or perhaps bend to the state of the observer, with different personalized images seen by each character even if they're looking at the same thing.
House delivers on an astonishing amount of levels. It is horrifying, intensely disturbed, and with enough grief for twelve funerals. It is sad, sad and utterly life like, as relationships crumble and egos even more so. It is frequently hilarious. It is meticulous, a jimmy rustling characterization of the absolute furthest reaches of the mind and the images it has the ability to create. It is well researched and even more, like... well there's a veritable smorgasbord of very particular and specific footnotes and references to many many many made up things that are quite scholarly. On top of it all,
House proves once again that there is nothing outside of yourself that can even come close to matching the terror of the human mind.
10/10