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The book interweaves the manuscript with over 400 footnotes to works real and imagined, thus illuminating both the text and Truant's mental disintegration. First novelist Danielewski employs avant-garde page layouts that are occasionally a bit too clever but are generally highly effective. Although it may be consigned to the "horror" genre, this novel is also a psychological thriller, a quest, a literary hoax, a dark comedy, and a work of cultural criticism.
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Truant, an apprentice at a Los Angeles tattoo parlor, decided to complete and submit the work for posthumous publication. The rest of the book is punctuated by footnotes by Truant, whether fact-checking, editorializing, translating, or interjecting seemingly irrelevant personal anecdotes. Truant's work is further supplemented by uncredited professional editors, who profess to have, in turn, never met Truant. When Johnny Truant attempts to organize the many fragments of a strange manuscript by a dead blind man, it gains possession of his very soul. The manuscript is a complex commentary on a documentary film (The Navidson Record) about a house that defies all the laws of physics. Navidson's exploration of a seemingly endless, totally dark, and constantly changing labyrinth in the house becomes an examination of truth, perception, and darkness itself.
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The album Haunted also draws heavily from the novel, featuring tracks called "House of Leaves", "Exploration B" and "5&½ Minute Hallway", and many less obvious references. The video for "Hey Pretty" also features Mark Danielewski reading from House of Leaves (pp. 88–89), and in House of Leaves, the band Liberty Bell's lyrics were also songs on Poe's album. The book was followed by a companion piece called The Whalestoe Letters, a series of letters written to the character Johnny Truant by his mother while she was confined in a mental institution. Arriving at the house to help Navidson measure its dimensions, Tom is said to have improved the family's relationships and mood during his presence. Tom extended his stay to assist in the hallway explorations and subsequent rescue, in which he camped alone for days in the maze to maintain radio contact, built an improvised pulley to assist in the rescue, and, ultimately, saved the Navidsons' children from the house at the cost of his own life.
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The Navidson Record, his film of these explorations, becomes the intense focus of a blind man called Zampanò, who writes about the footage with lengthy, academic precision. When Zampanò is found dead in his apartment, troubled tattoo artist Johnny Truant discovers his notes and inherits the fixation. As Truant becomes increasingly obsessed with the story, so too does the reader. Though Truant attributes Zampanò as the author of The Navidson Record, Truant offers few concrete details about Zampanò's character or past, citing only information learned from his former acquaintances. These include neighbors and various students and social workers, exclusively female, who volunteered as readers for Zampanò's research.
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He experiences a series of episodes in which he breaks with reality; he thinks events occur then immediately finds out they did not occur, so much so that the reader is often unsure of what is happening in the reality of the novel. Johnny sometimes sees or experiences “the beast”—a type of animal or being with a threatening, destructive presence. Johnny’s physical health deteriorates, and he leaves his apartment less and less, finally getting fired from the tattoo shop. Eventually, Johnny decides to put the manuscript in storage and goes on a quest to Virginia, to find the house on Ash Tree Lane recorded in the documentary The Navidson Record. While travelling, he encounters a band who are in possession of the manuscript he has been working on; they report that the manuscript has been distributed.
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The novel is written as a work of epistolary fiction and metafiction focusing on a fictional documentary film titled the Navidson Record, presented as a story within a story discussed in a handwritten monograph recovered by the primary narrator, Johnny Truant. The narrative makes heavy use of multiperspectivity as Truant's footnotes chronicle his efforts to transcribe the manuscript, which itself reveals the Navidson Record's supposed narrative through transcriptions and analysis depicting a story of a family who discovers a larger-on-the-inside labyrinth in their house. Johnny Truant is a tattoo shop employee living in Hollywood who frequently drinks, uses drugs, and has sex with women. He and his friend, Lude, discover The Navidson Record in the room of a recently-deceased man named Zampanò. Johnny takes the manuscript home and begins reading it, becoming more and more obsessed with it as time goes on. He starts compiling a series of footnotes to Zampanò’s text, in which the actions of his own life unfold.
She resumed living in the house, becoming confident that Navidson can still be found within. She found Navidson emaciated and maimed by frostbite and injury, but they materialized together safely outside the house. The film concludes with Navidson and Karen marrying, and reuniting their family in Vermont. Ultimately, Navidson returned to the house alone, leaving only a seemingly incoherent letter for Karen.
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Even as he grows increasingly unstable, Truant remains steadfast in his editorial work, neglecting all else. She turned to filmmaking herself to reconcile her relationship with Navidson, while also showing his footage to literary, artistic, and scientific authorities such as Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick, Douglas Hofstadter, Ken Burns, Harold Bloom, Camille Paglia, Hunter Thompson, Anne Rice, and Jacques Derrida. Navidson, still investigating the house, sought explanations from laboratory analysis, only to learn that samples taken from the maze are older than the Earth itself. Flouting conventions of academic writing, Zampanò narrates the lives of the Navidson family during the events depicted in The Navidson Record, set in April 1990, including unfilmed events sourced from media and public records. The family are Will Navidson; his unmarried partner, Karen Green, a former fashion model; and their two children, Chad and Daisy.
By Mark Z. Danielewski
The text is further marred by missing pages, missing footnotes, missing supplemental documents, and text accidentally or deliberately destroyed by Zampanò, Truant, or unknown causes. House of Leaves is also the "book," painstakingly compiled by a strange old man named Zampanò, acquired after his death by Johnny Truant, an apathetic slacker mired in drugs and sad sex. Johnny's obsessive immersion in the manuscript echoes the black-hole threat of the hallway to Navidson; both are caught then consumed by the need to go deeper than safety, or sanity, can support; both will risk their lives in pursuit of the secret of the hallway, and both will be damaged by the experience in ways they cannot anticipate or escape. The questions, author biography, and suggested reading that follow are intended to enhance your group’s reading and discussion of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. We hope they will provide you with a variety of ways of thinking and talking about this truly challenging and extraordinary book. When a mysterious doorway appears, leading to a maze of smooth, ash-grey walls, Will Navidson – the house’s owner, a Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist – goes in to investigate.
On their mission, Holloway breaks with reality and shoots Wax and Jed, killing the latter. After everyone leaves the hallway, the house starts a type of attack on the owners, forcing everyone to leave. House of Leaves was accompanied by a companion piece (or vice versa), a full-length album called Haunted recorded by Danielewski's sister, Anne Danielewski, known professionally as Poe.
While travelling, Johnny also visits The Whalestoe Institute, the psychiatric hospital where his mother lived, prior to her suicide. Rather than Danielewski, the title page of House of Leaves credits two men named Zampanò and Johnny Truant as its authors. In an introduction dated 1998, Truant claims to have found the book as an unfinished manuscript left by the recently deceased Zampanò, having never met the author in life.
Navidson's camera captured himself attempting to read a book titled House of Leaves in total darkness; having lost all supplies, he resorted to burning the book page by page to provide light for reading. Truant, however, debunks The Navidson Record as a wholesale fabrication, citing his own findings that the film does not exist; that Navidson is a fictionalization of the real-life photojournalist Kevin Carter; and that Zampanò outright invented numerous sources and quotes. Truant also determines that Zampanò copied secondary sources to hide his own inexpertise in various subjects. More paradoxically, Truant notes that Zampanò purports to authoritatively write about filmmaking and cinematography despite being blind. At the same time, Truant's own factual errors, limited knowledge, and open admission to adulterating Zampanò's work also throw his own reliability into question.
Zampanò's text claims that The Navidson Record, a documentary film directed by an acclaimed photojournalist named Will Navidson, became an American cultural phenomenon upon its theatrical release in 1993, generating volumes of multidisciplinary academic literature, as well as extensive media coverage in popular culture. In support, Zampanò cites or quotes articles, journals, symposia, books, magazines, TV programs, and interviews, many supposedly dedicated to this film. Zampanò discusses not only Navidson's filmmaking techniques, but also segues into topics such as photography, architecture, Biblical studies, and radiometric dating, often interspersing overwhelmingly esoteric tangents, several of which devolve into nonsensical, page-long lists of only superficially relevant items. Though many of the academic works Zampanò cites appear to analyze the Record purely as a work of horror fiction, Zampanò's writing remains adamant as to its authenticity.
In 2001, a remake of Poe's song "Hey Pretty (Drive-By 2001 Mix)," which featured Danielewski reading from House of Leaves, reached #13 on Billboard's Alternative Chart. That summer, Poe and Danielewski spent three months as the opening act for Depeche Mode's 2001 North American tour. On this tour, he played Madison Square Garden.[14] He also composed the song "A Rose Is a Rose,"[29] which Poe sang on the Lounge-a-Palooza compilation album. Peters had no idea there was a blind character in House of Leaves before he started it, and says the book’s use of sound, rather than visual descriptions, made it a unique reading experience for him. “We always read about visual descriptions of characters, places and objects, but what literature does not understand is, though sight is an important sense, it is one of five,” he says.
Entirely written by Truant, this chapter recounts the conclusion of his downward spiral after Lude's death. Truant invents two different accounts of positive turnarounds, only to disavow both. He then describes setting fire to the completed manuscript, and, after a struck-out passage in purple – the only such passage in the entire book – Truant tells an ambiguous story about a woman who loses her baby in childbirth. Meanwhile, Karen followed Navidson, finding the house now normal and the hallway gone.
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