House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
A young family in the novel relocates to a modest house on Ash Tree Lane, where they quickly learn that something is seriously amiss: the interior of the house is larger than the exterior. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his partner Karen Green were ready to deal with the fallout from that impossibility—that is, until one day when their two young children started to wander off and their voices eerily started to return another story—of creature darkness, of an ever–growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl that would soon enough tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
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This book is a thinly veiled autobiographical narrative about the author’s parents that is presented as experimental literary fiction.
Zampano is familiar to Lude, a friend of Johnny’s because they share an apartment complex. The elderly guy forebodingly warns Lude that he will pass away shortly, and he does. Lude and Johnny enter the flat covertly after the body has vanished to search through Zampano’s belongings. They discover a bizarre manuscript, which Johnny brings home.
At first, it’s straightforward. After the family returns from their trip, they discover a hallway linking two bedrooms on the second level that wasn’t there before. Even though the gap between the walls isn’t intended to be a finished hallway with doors, they find a blueprint of the structure and see that it does. Okay, no big deal; after all, it’s a new house and they had just moved in before going on vacation. Perhaps they hadn’t noticed the doors before. Then you realize that adding an inch to the measurement of the house through the hallway is illogical and cannot be explained.
The documentary’s major focus is on the study of a new door that suddenly appears on the first floor and should connect to a barren backyard, but instead leads to a long, dark hallway that opens up into a maze of huge, 1,000-foot rooms that lead to who knows where and hold who knows what. So Johnny locates this book, reads it, makes revisions, and adds his own footnotes regarding the research he did on Zampano’s life and the text’s contents, as well as personal asides and stream-of-consciousness musings about his own life. The Navidson Record isn’t real, he claims in the prologue where he describes how he discovered the text.
