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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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This powerful and extremely original novel is strongly recommended for all public and academic libraries.--Jim Dwyer, California State Univ. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Similarly, the cultural fascination with House of Leaves remains as fervent and as imaginative as ever. The novel has gone on to inspire doctorate-level courses and masters theses, cultural phenomena like the online urban legend of “the backrooms,” and incredible works of art in entirely unrealted mediums from music to video games. Through reading the manuscript, we learn about the events of the film, The Navidson Record.
By Mark Z. Danielewski
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.
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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.
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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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Reading Group Guide
The two works cross-pollinated heavily over the course of their creations, each inspiring the other in various ways. Poe's statement on the connection between the two works is that they are parallax views of the same story. House of Leaves refers to Poe and her songs several times, not only limited to her album Haunted, but Hello as well. One example occurs when the character Karen Green is interviewing various academics on their interpretations of the short film "Exploration #4"; she consults a "Poet," but there is a space between the "Poe" and the "t," suggesting that Poe at one point commented on the book. An appendix provided by the editors includes a miscellany of writings from both Zampanò and Truant excluded from the body of the book, an obituary for Truant's birth father, and a series of letters later compiled in the Whalestoe Letters.
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.
House of Leaves
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.
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Many citations to critics, scholars, and media coverage present Navidson as a well-known public figure, with his notoriety further compounded by the film's release; the extent of this public interest is such that academics are supposedly divided into three conflicting schools of thought interpreting his unexplained motivations for returning to the house. The Whalestoe Letters, a compilation of letters written by Truant's mother Pelafina during her committal at The Three Attic Whalestoe Institution, are published both as an appendix to House of Leaves and as a standalone book with additional content. The explorations, already challenged by the maze's inhospitable, vast, and ever-shifting nature, finally led to disaster when one of the crew turned on the rest. After several ordeals, one explorer was killed and another rescued, but the house itself then transformed in a hostile fashion, killing Navidson's brother Tom and forcing the family to frantically escape.
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.
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.
A segment titled "Contrary Evidence", compiled by the editors themselves, instead contains what appears to be evidence of the Navidson Record's actual existence, with a series of artworks depicting segments or concepts from the film as well as what purports to be a single, bootleg frame from within the film itself. Or, to follow the premise of Mark Z. Danielewski's genre-bending debut, can a book about a book about a film be anything else? House of Leaves is both vast and claustrophobic, crammed with minutiae (footnotes, appendices, poems and letters, and layout trickery) yet cored by a deep, absorbing emptiness, a deliberate void that accommodates, even incorporates, each character's—perhaps even each reader's—expectations, quirks, and fears. We learn about Zampanò himself through his writing about the film, which Johnny ultimately determines does not actually exist. He has a series of women come visit him, read to him, and help him transcribe the manuscript.
Will Navidson, a character who is a Pulitzer-Prize winning photojournalist, and his partner, Karen Green, a former model, move into the house on Ash Tree Lane in Virginia with their children, Chad and Daisy. They discover that the house is slightly bigger on the outside than on the inside. At first, the hallway seems only a few feet in length but it grows and sparks in Will the need for investigation. Will enlists help from explorers Holloway Roberts, Jed Leeder, and Wax Hook to investigate the hallway.
Unable to even determine Zampanò's full name, Truant only confirms that Zampanò became blind some time during the 1950s, and was approximately eighty years old at the time of his death. Truant also learns that Zampanò was erratic and capricious in his lifestyle and writing habits, diagnosing him with graphomania. Parallel to the plot of the Record, Truant's footnotes document his descent into obsession, delusions, and paranoia as he compiles the manuscript. He recounts tales of sexual encounters, his lust for a tattooed dancer he calls Thumper, and his bar-hopping with his friend Lude.
Though Pelafina's letters and Johnny's footnotes contain similar accounts of their past, their memories also differ greatly at times, due to both Pelafina's and Johnny's questionable mental states. Pelafina was placed in the mental institution after supposedly attempting to strangle Johnny, only to be stopped by her husband. Johnny claims that his mother meant him no harm and claimed to strangle him only to protect him from missing her. It is unclear, however, if Johnny's statements about the incident—or any of his other statements, for that matter—are factual.
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