A man buys a house for his girlfriend and her two children. When a new door appears in a wall, they find a space that appears to be infinite, even though the outside form of the house remains the same. In five expeditions, the characters explore this vast space, and each try is documented in a different kind of narrative, each in its own typeface. Constructed of these self-referential texts, this metafiction examines the effects of a possibly haunted house on a group of people, each one more peripherally involved with it than the last. A New York Times Notable Book for 2000 and nominated for the 2000 Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel.
critical reviews
"[A] vast exploration and meditation on the paradoxical spaces that open out from--or as--our awareness. To make sure the word 'meditation' doesn't daunt you into a coma of respectful abstention, let me say right off that his book is funny, moving, sexy, beautifully told, an elaborate arrangement with the shape and meaning of narrative. For all its modernist maneuvers, postmodernist airs and post-post-modernist critical parodies, HOUSE OF LEAVES is, when you get down to it, an adventure story...." - Hildegard Schnuttgen (New York Times Book Review, 3/28/00)
"[T]he most ambitious and original first novel I've read since Pynchon's V.... The literary influences on HOUSE OF LEAVES are many and obvious, but Danielewski's design is ingenious, his mind rigorous, and his purpose admirable....Some few novels we do not judge. They judge us and the courage of our consciousness." - Richard M. Klein (Book, 4/1/00)
"[W]hile HOUSE OF LEAVES might not be the most elegantly compressed exercise..., it is an impressive first novel--and one with a refreshingly old-fashioned desire to Make It New." - Harold Ober (Times Literary Supplement, 7/28/00)
"HOUSE OF LEAVES is dizzying in every respect." - Harold Ober (Entertainment Weekly, 4/21/00)
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"I read this book in highschool in my free time, and it was nothing shy of AMAZING. It was alittle confusing at times as it jumped back and forth from different characters but overall it was purely wonderful. I have gone through two copies myself, and am currently looking for another copy. Over the past few years, mine have been read, highlighted,..." see more
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