House of Leaves
A young family moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story—of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.
Stats for nerds
59recommend
163mentions
139people
2007–2026years
42% recommend54% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- If you’re instead interested in a book about a house with 15 million tunnels, read House of Leaves!
- That's cool and all, but I generally prefer my text reflowable, and find PDF reading on any not-huge e-reader to be a pain in the ass. It's worth it for things that are rich in figures and formatting (like House of Leaves, many textbooks, comics and manga, etc), but for the typical novel or non-fiction book, I really do want just text and the most minimal formatting and layout instructions possible, so I can configure to my own comfort, not to whatever the publisher has decided they want me to see.
- There's a few books that are coupled with the term ergodic literature, chief among them House of Leaves. It really is a thoroughly enjoyable exercise to read that book, I highly recommend.
> (By the way, is your user name a joke on "sparky", the slang word for an electrician?)
It wasn't originally when I used it as a kid, but I grew in to that term later :)
- Wonderful, I read a little about House of Leaves, and am intrigued. What a great way to have a book recommended, looking forward to reading it. :)
- The faster you read House of Leaves the better the meta-experience.
- i like Infinite Jest, but among the "derivatives" of Nabokov's Pale Fire (the "original" postmodern novel + parody of academic hogwash with protos in Nabokov's earlier works; possible earlier proto in Poe's aesthetic defense of his poem The Raven), including Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Danielewski's House of Leaves, nothing touches Danielewski's semiotic sensibilities in deconstruction and architecture and his ultimate subversion of this "derivative" form of the postmodern novel (nonspoiler hint: having to "physically" llight the previous leaf/page to see the next). Still, I just reread Pale Fire recently, and missed the "Jung" context obscured by Kinbote's erotomania. I used to think that the Pale Fire poem was an absolute masterpiece. But after rereading Kinbote's notes there is no greater truth of the beauty of Art in the history of literature than how Kinbote elevated this masterpiece especially with his note comparing Disa and Shade. If you are interested in other media forms of Pale Fire, see Revolutionary Girl Utena or Sonny Boy.
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