2000 - Year in SF&F: March

THE WONDER TIMELINE: SF&F RETROSPECTIVE Read other issues here ---------------------------------------------- Mark Z. Danielewski "House of Leaves" © 2000, Random House --novel : 2000 Bram Stoker Award --first novel : 2000 Int. Horror Guild Award --first novel : 2001 Locus Poll --novel : 2001 British Fantasy Award Review by Deanna Josephson "House of Leaves" is not a book, it's an experience. Mark Z. Danielewski grabs your attention, distorts your reality, makes you question your own sanity, then leaves you spent, disoriented and not quite the same as when you started this novel. It opens with a brooding, inventive and unreliable narrator Johnny Truant. Johnny brings us along as he discovers a trunk of papers inside the apartment of a recently deceased man, Zampano, who died under suspicious circumstances. The trunk contains Zampano's collection and commentary of academic dissections of a documentary film, the Navidson Record. The Navidson Record is the axis of the story-within-a-story-within-a-story framework of the book, and documents the increasingly surreal and quietly horrific experience of a family who comes home to find a door that hadn't existed before. As Johnny reads through the papers and commentary he finds that Zampano, and perhaps he himself, is losing his grip on sanity as his obsession with the house grows deeper and deeper. The storyline of "House of Leaves" is only a piece of the overall experience. The book's structure lends an additional layer of depth to this literary collage. The labyrinthine narrative is framed by an equally dizzying array of footnotes, lists and lists of names, texts that need to be decoded, texts that wind around the page... all of which are riddled with bland passages of intense academic discourse. Although some would argue that the layout of the book is pretentious and ostentatious, I think it's a necessary part of the overall artwork. "House of Leaves" is not an easy book to read, but it's worth the experience. The book contains a large appendix which needs to be read thoroughly in order to get as much sense of the story as possible. This book is really like a collage, and like a collage, you can't look at each individual piece... you have to look at how all the pieces fit together. If you can make it through the layers of stories, ivory tower discourses, chaotic layout and haunting images, then take a step back and look again. I get the feeling the book will mean something different to you than it did to me. ---------------------------------------------- Return to the Wonder Timeline

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