I’m currently fighting my way through Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Placing it into a genre is rather useless. On some levels it is a love story, on another it is an existential horror story, on yet others, it is a puzzle contained within pages. It whirls past preconceived notions of what a book is and turns into something completely new.

It is a thick body of work of the story within the story within the story type that is so complex that it requires one to keep notes at least, and if the whole tale is to be understood properly there are messages to put up to a mirror in order to be read, subtle and obscure references to just about everything in Human history, and minute details must be payed attention to–there are codes to crack and messages to decode. This all might seem nonsensical on the surface, but there is a pattern.

I’ve barely made it into the first chapter and I’ve accumulated two legal sized pages of information. For what and to what end, I cannot say. Only by reading the book will time tell. So far, though, if you have time for such an ambitious project, I’d say it’s totally worth it.

To be continued…

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Evan Arnold