House of Leaves



"Or in other words: shy from the sky. No answer lies there. It cannot care, especially for what it no longer knows. Treat that place as a thing unto itself, independent of all else, and confront it on those terms. You alone must find the way. No one else can help you. Every way is different. And if you do lose yourself at least take solace in the absolute certainty that you will perish."

- Footnote 140, Chapter IX

House of Leaves is a 2000 novel by Mark Z. Danielewski. What about its plot?

Okay, imagine that this family is moving into a new house to jump-start their lives together. Will Navidson's a world-renowned photojournalist with lingering family issues, Karen Green is a former model with self-esteem issues, and Chad and Daisy are their two lovable children. Will decides to make this move-in a documentary of how he got his life back on track, and he mounts video cameras and microphones in different rooms of the house. About a month after they move in, the family goes to visit Karen's parents. When they return, there's a new addition to the house, a closet with a connecting doorway, between the master bedroom and Chad and Daisy's room. Furthermore, out of curiosity, Will measures the inside of the house compared with the outside to find out something startling: the inside is bigger than the outside by one quarter of an inch...

Hold on, that's not what this book is about at all. The Navidson Record is a recently-released documentary-style horror film with the plot described above, somewhat in the style of The Blair Witch Project, which opens to wide acclaim. It spurs countless theses and criticisms from academia, both for its moving themes and character studies but also for the perplexing riddle of the house and what it truly represents. Is it a throw-back to ancient customs? Perhaps the house is a Derrida-esque deconstruction of religion? Does the house, in fact, represent a vagina? A Portuguese(?) man named Zampanò assembles these criticisms and writes what is considered a top-notch commentary on the film and how it explores deep symbolic themes of family, tragedy, echoes, and the perceptual confusion and terror of labyrinths...

Wait, that's not right either. In fact, it's about what happens when one night, Johnny Truant and his friend Lude check out the apartment of a recently-deceased neighbor. Inside, they find the apartment has had all of its windows painted black with curtains hung over them to conceal all light, and the floor is literally crisscrossed with taped-down measuring tapes. Several parts of the room seem to have been destroyed by an incredibly strong man or some large creature. Inside, Truant finds the disheveled remains of a complex manuscript (the critical novel written by Zampanò) and slowly begins to piece it together, but as he does so, the world he used to know becomes infinitely more frightening...

No, no, that's still not quite hitting the core of this book. Okay, the real story is about Pelafina H. Lievre, a woman who is locked up inside the Three Attic Whalestoe Institute, a mental institution. She is the mother of a lovely boy named Johnny, and she's being treated for having hallucinations and breaks from reality that caused her to harm poor Johnny. Her only love in life anymore since the death of her poor husband is her son, and she writes him a series of letters expressing regret over her past actions. In the correspondence between them, she stresses that he is a brilliant child, and that if he puts his mind to it he can achieve anything. These letters grow more and more disturbing over time as her mind begins to break down...

Wait, no, that's still not right. Okay, you're interested in what House of Leaves is about, right? Well, this book is about that point directly behind your head. Don't look. Ω Don't take your eyes off this page, off the safe glow of the monitor, the comforting shapes of the letters making up this sentence. This is safe. What's behind you isn't. Keep reading these words. If you stop to look behind you, I can't guarantee you'll come out of this ordeal alive, much less sane. Pretty soon you might find yourself doubting what is real and what isn't. Pretty soon you might start to have the nightmares. One day you'll wake up to find yourself an emaciated wreck who can't trust space and time anymore. Whether something is real or not doesn't matter here; the consequences are the same. What you need to realize is that this is not for you.

Or you can have some pancakes with some delightful reading.

141 Unless you want to be invigorated. No...That's- it's just not- can't be- right... Source please? 142

142 Via Google Translate From French: "Looking into the eyes of death is intoxicating."

Not to be confused with House of Five Leaves, and certainly not with Dead Leaves. See also Poe, Danielewski's sister, whose album Haunted serves as a companion piece to the novel. Compare "Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius".

""I had one woman come up to me in a bookstore and say, 'You know, everyone told me it was a horror book, but when I finished it, I realized that it was a love story.' And she's absolutely right. In some ways, genre is a marketing tool.""
 * Alien Geometries: Eventually Navidson realizes that, somehow, no matter how he measures, the inside of the house is one-quarter inch larger than the outside. Then it turns into 5/16 of an inch. Then that 5/16 corrects itself. Then everything goes to hell.
 * Apocalyptic Log: The whole of The Navidson Record, or perhaps the entirety of the book, could qualify.
 * More concretely, the notebook which is all that remains of an 18th Century winter expedition which journeyed in the same area where the house would eventually stand: "ſtaires! We have found ſtaires!". Actually, it says "stairs", using the old-fashioned elongated "s" ('ſ') that looks more like a modern "f" than a modern "s". "Stairs! We have found stairs!"
 * Arc Words: Delial.
 * Ax Crazy:
 * Be Careful What You Wish For One could interpret the house's behavior as a sort of twisted wish fulfillment.
 * Bedlam House: Johnny's mother describes the Three Attic Whalestoe Institute as one of these in her letters.
 * Beige Prose: Occasional, used for contrast. See "A Poe t"'s comments on A Partial Transcript Of What Some Have Thought.
 * Better to Die Than Be Killed:
 * Bigger on the Inside:
 * Played straight by the house, which starts off the inner-most plot.
 * Also subverted. Tom's base is a tent with meagre supplies, and actual base consists of the Navidson estate.
 * The hardcover book itself is bigger on the inside. The cover is smaller than the pages.
 * Bilingual Bonus: Many occurrences, either to parody the frequent use of foreign languages in academic writing or to simply add confusion to the text. For example, Johnny states that he can't speak Latin, yet is able to allude to a Latin phrase later on. Zampanò provides a series of quotes he claims to be slightly different, but which are actually identical in meaning.
 * Bizarrchitecture: The house, especially behind that one door.
 * Black Best Friend: We don't know if Reston is Navidson's best friend, but they already know each other for some years (starting from the incident that did make Reston wheelchair-bound), and house, Reston lets Navidson stay at his place.
 * Breaking the Fourth Wall: In the middle of one of his crazed ramblings, Truant begins to suspect that he, Zampanò, and the Navidsons don't really exist and have been created by the house in some way. That sound you hear is the author laughing to himself.
 * Breather Episode: The transcript of What Some Have Thought is considerably lighter in tone than most other parts of the book.
 * Brown Note: Anyone who is vaguely connected to the house, even the Sheriff who tries to find Holloway and denies seeing the hallway, has tinnitus, at the very least. It's also noted that experience with the house eventually results in one of two extremes: either great personal improvement or, well... look at what happened to Johnny. There's an actual graph showing the effects of the house on people depending on exposure... and "anyone" includes you.
 * Casanova: Lude. Truant even spies on him, and there is an extremely large list of his one-night stands... which is then followed by a list of the various ways in which all of the people of the list might have had their lives ruined. The book is just messed up like that.
 * To a lesser extent, Johnny racks 'em up too. Theirs seems to be a world where Everyone Has Lots of Sex
 * Chekhov's Gun: Karen's Bookshelf.
 * Cluster F-Bomb: Page 100. In French, too.
 * Color Coded for Your Convenience: The book makes use of text in black, blue, red and purple.
 * Completely Missing the Point: The reviews on the back of the book about this "funny, moving, sexy" romance. Or maybe we're all missing the point of this love story by making it out to be horrifying.
 * According to the author, we are.

"Radio (Navidson): If it gets too much for you, go back. We'll be alright. Tom: Fuck yourself, Navy. Radio: What? Tom: Doesn't he go around autographing lightbulbs? Radio: Who? Tom: Watt. Radio: What? Tom: Nevermind. Over. Out. Whatever."
 * Conspiracy Theorist: Zampanò fits the character type, with his tendency to prefer the incredible to the mundane; for example, he's more willing to accept the stairway is deeper than the Earth is wide than he is to just check his math.
 * Conveniently Interrupted Document: Very frequently, with Johnny spilling ink on the pages of the manuscript or things like that. Interestingly, information which isn't important to the plot also sometimes gets damaged as well.
 * Cosmic Horror: possibly.
 * Creepy Child: "Daddy, I wanna play always !" And other instances; for example, at school all the kids are told to draw their houses. The Navidson children turn in pieces of paper that they colored several coats of black, with monsters in the margins..
 * Darkness Equals Death: Literally.
 * Deaf Composer: Zampanò, a blind movie reviewer.
 * Deus Ex Machina: House of Leaves is a book in the book.
 * Diabolus Ex Machina: Poor, poor
 * Damsel in Distress: Daisy's scenes during Navidson's explorations. Oh, boy.
 * Documentary of Lies: The reviewers who theorize endlessly about The Navidson Record, or are consulted about its content, take it entirely for granted that it's this trope. Except for Stephen King, who wants to visit the house.
 * Doing It for the Art: The sheer level of detail and thought that went into every single page of this book marks it out as a triumphant example of the trope. According to one interview, Danielewski spent ten years writing the thing, spending about ten hours writing each day.
 * Driven to Suicide:
 * Dropped a Bridge on Him: house.
 * Dysfunction Junction: Many of the Exploration Unit get all weird during the treks.
 * Easter Egg: Plenty of 'em!
 * Eldritch Abomination: Implied. Remember that point behind your head in the introduction to this page?
 * Eldritch Location
 * Environmental Symbolism
 * Erotic Dream: Painstakingly detailed ones at that...
 * Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Gdansk Man.
 * Fauxreigner: Is Zampanò French, Portuguese, or Spanish? The strongest implication is that he's French, due to Truant noticing he recites the names of French positions at Dien Bien Phu lost to the Viet Minh, when he's in despair.
 * Of course, most of the troops deployed to Dien Bien Phu were from the French Foreign Legion...
 * Fetish Retardant: Used deliberately with Johnnie.
 * Just to be clear, Johnnie (the woman) is an entirely separate character from Johnny (the commentator).
 * Fictional Media: To a ridiculous extent that could pass as a parody or Deconstruction. The entire book is a Fictional Document analyzing another unpublished Fictional Document commentating on a fictional film. Note that all of Zampanò's work is fictional in-universe, as well, to the great confusion of the editors and Johnny Truant.
 * Fictional Document: The Navidson Record, most of the references (lampshaded, but also subverted when some of the references turn out to be real books), the book itself.
 * Scrapbook Story
 * The Film of the Book: Averted -- Danielewski has received numerous option offers (often proposing quite generous sums), but has refused all of them, mostly on the grounds that the various studios' proposals for how to adapt the book tend to miss the point (such as by adapting only Navidson's story, and omitting Johnny, Zampanò etc., altogether).
 * Found Footage Films: The Navidson Record bears many traits of this genre.
 * Footnote Fever: You've got footnotes from Johnny Truant, Zampanò and other editors, plus footnotes within footnotes within footnotes, in one part even making an entire "window" in the book. Soon after that window, the footnotes start going off in weird angles and, should you actually bother to follow, forming actual labyrinths. Some footnotes are re-referenced hundreds of pages later, and some of the more important ones get their own symbols.
 * Four Is Death
 * The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Neither fourth wall will. Johnny slowly goes insane as he reads more and more of Zampanò's notes. And many Tropers can attest to the fact that the book is pure Paranoia Fuel.
 * Though the book is kind enough to warn you when something is probably too close to the truth to be safe to read.
 * Genius Loci: A nasty one.
 * Going by the Matchbook: One of the countless reviewers of The Navidson Record thought that he could locate the house via a screencap of Navidson's matchbook.
 * Gratuitous Foreign Language: There are entire paragraphs written entirely in German and French throughout the book, as well as untranslated chunks of The Divine Comedy and bits of Latin and Greek, plus various others.
 * Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Thumper, though she's just a stripper. She's still the most caring and dependable friend Johnny has.
 * Hope Spot: When Johnny comes across his two doctor friends who take him in and nurse him back to health.  ?
 * A House Divided: Soon after discovery, Navidson's lover begins to snap and fight with Navidson, Navidson's associates begin arguing constantly (to the point that one of them, and the children get more violent.
 * Hypocritical Humor: Zampanò alleges that the Weinstein brothers left a particular sequence out of the theatrical cut of The Navidson Record because it was too self-referential. This, in a book where half the book is just one character commenting on the other half.
 * It Got Worse: In the middle of, and right after, Exploration D. during his last exploration, but looking through his notes will tell you.
 * Johnny's situation starts getting worse the instant he begins editing the book.
 * Jittercam: Zampanò mentions that this trope is averted whenever Will Navidson himself was filming, him being an expert photo- and cinematographer and all. Naturally, the quality of the framing rapidly diminishes whenever anyone else is doing the filming.
 * Kick the Dog: The Pekinese.
 * Kill'Em All: Averted; check the examples.
 * Kill It with Fire:
 * Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: Anne Rice, Stephen King, Harold Bloom, Steve Wozniak, Walter Mosley, Stanley Kubrick and Camille Paglia among others...
 * Leave the Camera Running: Navidson is described as doing this more than once, a notable example being, which makes house  all the more frightening.
 * Left Hanging
 * Lemony Narrator: Johnny.
 * Literary Agent Hypothesis, multiple layers.
 * Living Labyrinth
 * Loads and Loads of Characters
 * Looking for Love In All the Wrong Places: Johnny Truant. It comes to a point he's interrupting the narrative just to describe whatever girl he last nailed.
 * Lysistrata Gambit: It's mentioned at some point that Karen once wouldn't let Will Navidson touch her. For thirteen months.
 * Madness Mantra: "I'm Holloway Roberts. Born in Menomonie, Wisconsin..."
 * Malevolent Architecture
 * Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane
 * Meaningful Name:
 * Holloway Roberts: "hollow way" = "hallow way" = "hallway" = "always" = "all ways")
 * House of Leaves. "Leaves" = "pages," thus the house is the book and / or vice versa.
 * The vulgar druggie know as Lude!
 * Metafictional Title
 * Mind Screw: The book will screw with you on every conceivable level.
 * Mobile Maze
 * New House New Problems: The inner story all starts when Navidson moves...
 * New Weird
 * Nightmare Dreams
 * Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book: The drawings Daisy and Chad make in school that disturb Chad's teacher. They show a big black square, colored in several coats of black, surrounded by monsters.
 * No Fourth Wall: See Mind Screw above and Painting the Fourth Wall.
 * Nothing Is Scarier: House of Leaves is pretty much Exhibit A for this trope.
 * Obfuscating Stupidity: Johnny may seem like a vulgar druggie, yet he is actually quite an intelligent man. It is heavily implied in the book that he wrote the Pelican Poems during his travels in Europe.
 * Only Known by Their Nickname: Thumper
 * Painting the Fourth Wall:
 * The book is printed in four colors, although there are some variations between the different versions.
 * Normal text is printed in black, and the word "house" always appears in blue, including in the title, copyright information, etc.
 * Mythological references are in red, as are struck-out passages which are, according to Truant, things Zampanò wanted to leave out. They are usually passages that are at least vaguely threatening to the reader. "Minotaur" may or may not be struck out, depending on if it's used in one of the aforementioned mythological references.
 * Purple is used only three times, but it's supposedly very important. It's used on the cover for the words "A Novel", "First Edition", and towards the end of the story "" Bear in mind that A), Johnny associates purple with his mother, and B), purple is made by combining red and blue. Make of that what you will...
 * Word of God states that the colour blue is used in a manner analogous to Chroma Key. Start scratching your heads, folks...
 * On some pages, the lines are typed at angles or go around the edges of geometric shapes, with the rest of the page being white space. Other pages are blank except for footnotes.
 * Physical God: Sort of: at one point Navidson expresses the view that the house is God. Whether it fits this trope depends on whether you think the house is sentient or not, or whether you think it matters.
 * Post Modernism: With perhaps an equal degree of straight and parody of post-modernism. Of course, it's impossible to actually parody post-modernism so the effect just becomes even more recursive which becomes even more the point.
 * The Power of Love: house
 * Prison Rape / Orderlies Are Creeps: Pelafina becomes convinced that the attendants in the mental hospital are raping her on a monthly basis as part of an urge to spiritually "break" her.
 * Prophetic Names: Johnny Truant.
 * Rainbow Speak: The book itself.
 * Rape as Backstory:  Although her estranged half sister told the world that the two of them were raped by their stepfather, she never confirms this. But it's hinted to be the source of
 * Rape as Drama:, if you decode   That is, if she's not completely nuts and making up or hallucinating the whole thing.
 * Really Gets Around: In addition to drugs, Johnny and Lude's lives seem to revolve around sex.
 * Ripped from the Headlines: The real Delial.
 * Room Full of Crazy:
 * Eventually Truant's studio apartment has all-black walls covered in random scraps of paper with drawings of empty black hallways on them, homemade soundproofing made of egg cartons, aluminum foil covering the windows, and tape measures on every wall so he knows the minute the place starts expanding.
 * Zampanò's room also counts. Boxes of paper and scraps, some of which are littered onto the floor, and the strange gouge marks all over the place.
 * Rule of Scary: Well, sorta.
 * Rule of Symbolism, references, highlighted in various colors and fonts, such as to the Greek labyrinth and The Minotaur, to make SURE we don't miss them. Not to mention several more layered references to various mythologies. Oh, and the poem of Yggdrasil at the very end.
 * Science Cannot Comprehend Phlebotinum: Double Subverted. The stuff from the walls inside the labyrinth in the house actually can be chemically analyzed and consists of normal elements. But the results make no sense in context and only make things more baffling --
 * The Scottish Trope
 * Serious Business: The Navidson Record. Everyone who's anyone, and most people who aren't, have analyzed, reviewed, or called attention to it. It's also, apparently, an extremely studied film in psychology, and has numerous theories about why Navidson, even though he knows the danger of the house, keeps descending into it. Except that, even within the universe the book purports to be from, there is no evidence the film ever existed, and none of the people Zampanò quotes about it have ever made those statements.
 * Sex Montage: There's a brief part where Johnny reviews a list of Lude's sexcapades of the past month, many of which involve some rather eyebrow-raising activites (golden showers, wetsuits, threesomes, etc.). However, Johnny immediately deconstructs this trope by imagining a tragic backstory for each girl (abortions, rape, Parental Incest, prostitution, and so on). It's that kind of book.
 * Shout-Out
 * Single-Issue Psychology
 * Slipstream
 * Snicket Warning Label:
 * The book's dedication, which says "This is not for you."
 * Snuff Film: One of the footnotes describes a film that drew just as much attention as The Navidson Record called La Belle Niçoise et Le Beau Chien, noted for its depiction of the murder of a little girl with "comic reality." The film garnered rave reviews and was universally considered a classic of arthouse cinema... until it was discovered that the filmmaker actually killed a young Lithuanian girl to create it.
 * Stealth Parody: It has been suggested that the novel might be so complex and strange because Danielewski is just messing with us.
 * Stepford Smiler: Karen Green, especially after the first exploration.
 * Straw Feminist: Camille Paglia.
 * Stylistic Suck: As one of his amanuenses complains, Zampanò writes "like a freshman" who should get a C- at best, conveying his scanty insights in a tone of lofty certainty, dragging in basic summaries of well-known subjects, attempting to impress with irrelevant precision and lengthy quotations, and in general b.s.-ing for all he's worth. It's implied this is intentional on his part.
 * Super-Powered Evil Side
 * Suspiciously Specific Denial:
 * The index of the book feels the need to list several words (exactly one hundred, as it happens) with a "DNE" (as in "Does Not Exist") label instead of a page number. Presumably because these words don't exist.  Some words listed with DNE are also symbolic, e.g. defenestration, the act of throwing someone or something out of a window.
 * In several pages of the book, there are multiple sidebars that describe what architectural features are NOT found in the labyrinthine sections of the house, resulting in the author taking multiple pages to say "The labyrinth in the house has featureless black walls, floors, and ceilings, and does not resemble any particular architectural style." Picture that. In your dreams.
 * Take Our Word for It
 * Tentative Light: The climax. In an interesting twist, Navidson to give him light. And in doing so,   Possibly.
 * These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: As evidenced by Johnny's descent into madness.
 * Through the Eyes of Madness: Well past the optical nerve.
 * Title Drop: In The Navidson Record and one of Zampanò's miscellaneous poems. And not just Title Drop but ''House.
 * Time Abyss: The Labyrinth: the deeper you go down the older it gets. The oldest sample Navidson tests turns out to be
 * Totally Radical: Johnny Truant.
 * Twofer Token Minority: Reston.
 * Ultimate Evil: The Minotaur
 * Unconventional Formatting: Probably the most well-known modern example. See Painting the Fourth Wall.
 * Unintentional Period Piece: By the book's 2000 publication, Johnny's 1990s Slacker persona was already borderline dated. As time moves along, he increasingly resembles an ill-conceived beatnik or hippie stereotype from the media of earlier generations.
 * Unfunny Aneurysm Moment: Very early in the story (page 10 or 11), Navy throws away a bit of Karen's hair that's stuck in a brush, and Karen jokingly states that she'll go bald one day and need that hair.
 * Unreliable Narrator: All of them -- there are at least three, one of whom introduces himself by recounting an outlandish story he told a group of girls. He further admits that he regularly makes up such stories and at one point admits
 * The Un-Reveal: Several.
 * One chapter is dedicated to scientific analysis of various materials recovered from the house. Sounds like it would answer a lot of questions, right? Well, Johnny says he accidentally destroyed most of the manuscript for that chapter. That's not the Unreveal, though -- right after the missing analysis it's stated there was nothing unusual about the materials. Except for the part that the different samples were from different ages, up to the point that . Basically the house is just saying "screw you(r mind)" at any attempts at making sense of it.
 * Meanwhile, at various points in the story, there will be footnotes asking the reader to refer to some document numbered Exhibit One through Six -- all six exhibits have no actual content and are just notes by Zampanò to remind himself to write them.
 * Karen Green had apparently travelled the world and showed the exploration films to various celebrities, such as Woz, Stephen King, Hunter S. Thompson, among others, and recorded their thoughts of it, and what the house means. Truant decides to contact said celebrites -- all he gets is a letter from a composer who claims he never heard of Karen or the house, and an insulting postcard from a feminist Karen interviewed. And yet, a French-Israeli author had seen proof of the interviews...
 * Finally, there's Navidson's Dream #3, which is described as "more troubling and by far most terrifying" and otherwise made to sound interesting. It's entirely missing, but instead we get the genuine reveal of Johnny finally remembering one of his own nightmares.
 * Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Zampanò's little documentary... starts to spin out of control, suffice to say.
 * The World Tree: A poem refers to Yggdrasil, the world-linking tree of Norse mythology. Whether the implied connection to the house is literal, figurative, or just the latest in a long list of mind screws is unclear.
 * Who's on First?: When Navidson, Tom, and Reston go into the house to find Holloway, Tom puts the radio to good use.
 * The World Tree: A poem refers to Yggdrasil, the world-linking tree of Norse mythology. Whether the implied connection to the house is literal, figurative, or just the latest in a long list of mind screws is unclear.
 * Who's on First?: When Navidson, Tom, and Reston go into the house to find Holloway, Tom puts the radio to good use.


 * Writers Cannot Do Math: Zampanò certainly can't. His acceleration calculation that claims the stairway is deeper that the circumference of the Earth makes the minor error of forgetting terminal velocity. Navidson would probably have noticed something off about a quarter travelling at 65,500 miles per hour, given it would have hit the ground with the energy of a stick of dynamite.
 * Well the house already has a history of fucking with mathematics, so...
 * This error would actually make the depth of the hole even GREATER then the circumference of the Earth.
 * Which wouldn't be out of place for this house.
 * even when you do the math properly, the house is STILL several times deeper than the Marianas Trench

Ω Regarder dans les yeux de la mort est enivrant. 141