House of Leaves

Books, comics, TV, music
1

(Originally started for the horror novel thread, but it kind of spun out of itself. Pretty random and I haven’t bothered looking this over, so apologies in advance if this is hard to make any sense of. I just finished this book and wanted to quickly record some of my thoughts about House of Leaves before the impression muted. Some people will probably think this is pretentious.)

It is pretty interesting to see a lot of people at Quarter to Three recommending House of Leaves as a horror novel. Not that I disagree, although referring to House of Leaves as “scary” is sort of a spluttering of the brain’s adjective locomotion engine. “Intensely disquieting” is a better description of the effect it left upon me. Either way though, when people identify House of Leaves as a horror novel, it seems to me to say something very interesting about the emotional history imprinted on them by their own ideas. Because I would imagine that the sort of people who could understand why House of Leaves is a horror novel are probably not all that common.

The best way to illustrate this is probably to break down the two main parts of House of Leave’s entwining narrative structure.

a) A mock film criticism on an imaginary film/documentary called the Navison Record. This is really the main “horror” narrative, in that it resembles a conventional haunted house story. The plot is this: Bill Navison is an award winning photojournalist who moves into a Virginian house with his family only to discover a door leading to another house inside, the dimensions of which are totally impossible and constantly shifting, as if the construction of the house was made by using reality as a sheet of wax paper to trace over an nth-dimensional architectural plan. The house is in all ways except the extensions of its space completely uniform: it is empty, cold and always black. The Navsion Record basically relates the various psychological effects this space has upon the Navisons, and like most overwrought film criticism spends entire chapters trying to cram disparate physical, mythological and psycho- analyses into the “meaning” of the film and the symbolism of the house. None the less, these various attempts to read convoluted intellectual meaning into the meaningless void that the Navison Record describes form a labyrinth that gives the structure of the novel symbolic resonance.

The author of this section is an old blind man named Zampano. According to the compiler’s notes on this section, The Navison Record is not a real film even within the context of the novel – it is meant to be entirely made up by Zampano, as well as the majority of the footnotes and criticisms quoted in it.

b) Johnny Truant’s footnotes. Largely through memories, anecdotes and hallucinations, the compiler of Zambano’s manuscript descries the growing existential dread that is spurred in him by his obsession with the work.

In my opinion, House of Leaves is a horror novel where the monster is actually the novel itself and the horror is the metaphysical horror / existential vertigo of realizing how completely alien ideas and intellectualism are to the universe that we primally feel.

In my own life, I’ve felt this sort of thing twice, and I guess I’ll quickly delve into this just to more clearly explain what I mean.

I had very bad asthma when I was around four or five, which was medicated by a drug called Theophylline. I was on this for a few months when, one night, I began to scream about millions of ants covering the staircase while I was being carried up to bed. This caused my parents to realize that I’d been regularly hallucinating for the last few months and take me off the medication, which stopped my hallucinations. I’m not exactly sure if what I’m about to relate happened during that time, but one night, I was lying in my small bedrom trying to go to sleep. My bed was about ten feet away facing the open door, which allowed an oblong rectangle of slanting light to enter my darkened room. Beyond I could see my parent’s room where they were getting for bed and laughing about something. This was no more than thirty feet away from where I was lying, but all of a sudden, I broke out into a sweat and began crying, because I suddenly became absolutely certain that I was looking across an almost infinite gulf of space which I remember clearly thinking would take me at least ten thousand years to cross. I was telling this to Lutes recently and he thought that I suddenly began to judge space on an atomic level, which is probably a good way to describe it, but the panic I felt was also metaphysical agoraphobia. Regardless, without the room even appearing to grow larger, all it took to cause me to panic was temporarily rejecting the conventional geometry of space and distances that we usually use to make sense of the universe we are in.

A few years back, I also ended up feeling this when my faith in Christianity broke down. This wasn’t for any intellectual reasons, but just because I suddenly realized that I no longer felt the universe made any sense on that level. It started with a perfectly normal dread of death, which I think everyone feels at one point or another. However, that soon led to the metaphysical agoraphobia I felt when I was five, although this time in relationship to the way I felt a subjective perspective of blinking out of existence would be. In other words, I imagined death to be like being an infinite distance away from the comforts of friends and family – again, a metaphysical agoraphobia.

Later, I tried to reason myself out of these horrible thoughts. I argued that if I died and that was it, it would for me be like I never existed at all and I would not be around to juxtapose these two states of being. There wouldn’t be loneliness; there would just be nothing. Instead of comforting me, though, this ended up just leading me down another malignant emotional path where the idea of one day not existing made my life seem growingly unreal. If experience is objectively fleeting and unrecordable, it stands to reason that, subjectively (the only way a person can view their life), it is meaningless. I eventually got over this but not after wrestling for months not only with a sense of completely unreality but also a profound dread of the existence I was currently in but felt that I could no longer trust.

For me, these two experiences in my life really gave House of Leaves resonance. Zampano’s layer of the book describes an impossible space (which is as large as the universe and is also symbolic of it) which devours any evidence of the existence of anything that enters it. Zampano then attempts to make sense of this space by reading thousands of intellectual ideas upon it. These ideas and justifications are irrelevant to our primal understandings of such a space yet they convolute this understanding to such an extent that it just deepens our horror of the universe. This is because, like the house, we all primally feel that the universe just is and is the only thing that ever will be. History, mythology, mathematics, science, our own lives - this is merely a thin layer of whitewash on bleak, immutable walls of an existence which shouldn’t be. Ideas and facts don’t make up the universe: it has no need for them. Only we do.

Truant’s section of the book is actually the worst written, largely because Danielewski falls into the same old stream-of-consciousness trap that so many novelists fall into. For the record, stream-of-consciousness is neither easy to write nor even particularly all that great of a literary device to relate psychological or emotional confusion (which it is almost exclusively used for). Danielewski attempts to use it that way here and he fails because he isn’t very good at it. Actually, the entire Truant section isn’t very good, filled with dozens of Poppy-Z-Britesque horror novel cliches. Still, the book’s structure needs Truant’s portion: it illustrates the malignant psychological effect that ideas, when made to seem ridiculous and irrelevant to reality itself, can have on an intelligent, sensitive mind. This entire section could be written about a jillion times better, but it couldn’t have been left out if House of Leaves was to be a novel instead of exactly what it is mocking: the futility of intellectual justification of the universe in order to steel ourselves against the sickening vertigo of seeing and accepting it for what it is.

This would not be a book I would blanket recommend to someone looking for a horror novel. In fact, I don’t even want to qualify it as one, since it is not a piece of genre fiction. It is deeply symbolic, a literary experiment to relay metaphysical dread. It is not an escapist scare. In fact, for it to be scary at all, I think the reader really needs to have already experienced what it is attempting to invoke, and unlike jumping at sounds in the night or the fear of being murdered, existential horror is not something that every person will feel. Still, for a certain type of person, this is probably one of the most disquieting novels you could ever read. I would strongly recommend it to someone who wants to read a largely successful literary experiment that uncovers a primal emotional undercurrent, and to a receptive reader, this undercurrent, once exposed, will make them exceptionally uneasy. But I would tell anyone who asked for a recommendation for a good “horror read” to stay clear, because, as the opening dedication to House of Leaves reads, “this is not for you.”

PS: The book’s typographical structure at first looks a bit too precious, but I think it is probably worth remembering that the Navison house is actually meant to symbolize the book you are holding in your hands (not the other way around). Consequently, just like the Navison house, it is constantly changing and will always be different when revisiting it. The entire work is really just incredibly symbolic. For example, consider the picture of the doorknob on the front cover, the meaning of which is elaborated upon later during a seemingly pointless discussion of the meaning of doorknobs as drawn by children - according to the book, doorknobs indicate that a house is inhabited by someone or something. Although sometimes the typography of the book definitely becomes overly precious and even pretentious, for the most part, I don’t think the work could have been presented any other way.

Truant ends up deciding that Zampano’s criticism of the Navison Record is all fiction. That’s probably true, but I think I’m right when I say that Navison’s house is supposed to be the book itself. Zampano’s account of the Navison Record is symbolic of his own horror of the universe and parodies his attempts to make sense of something that is intrinsically nonsensical. He also writes himself in as one of the main characters in the Navison record: Tom. Proof is on page 320, when there is an easy to miss slip from third to first person in the Navison criticism: “[Tom] might have spent all night drinking had exhaustion not caught up with me.” Also some talk elsewhere of Zampano’s own mysterious twin brother. Tom parodies the Navison house to comfort him against it and eventually dies by being crushed to death by it. Zampano crushes his own life with the bizarre parody he spends his life on in order to make sense of it.

Definitely don’t get the ebook version of House of Leaves.

2

Yikes. What do I win for wading through that? ;)

I kid because I love, Doc. Some things to add to what’s actually a very solid analysis (and one which I largely agree with).

  1. To me, the effective “horror” is probably more aptly described as a “creepy disquiet” that builds little by little into a fairly frightening whole. What is so effective is the matter-of-factness of realizing that your simple house measures significantly larger inside than outside. Think about how you’d react to that simple, but impossible fact, staring you in the face. What the fuck do you do about this? How “The Navidson Record” deals with this and how the characters handle it is where some very real chills occur.

  2. I think the background and revelations about the manuscript are also creepy as hell. A guy writes an incredibly detailed treatise about a film? Okay. A film that doesn’t exist? Huh. The guy writing the treatise is blind and unable to watch the film in any event? That’s when the “what the hell is going on here?!?” thing clicks bigtime with the reader.

3

This is why Qt3 is the only game board for me.

So, how do we adapt HoL to a video game?

4

Triggercut’s initial post about the book intrigued me and now that the good Dr. has given his brief analysis, I’ll have to track it down.

Seriously, good stuff you two. I wanted to reply yesterday, but it has taken me eighteen hours to digest Crypt’s post and cut’s addition.

5

Just to sort of expound upon what triggercut said about how the real creepiness of the novel is the vastness of space it is describing, there’s two parts where this is particularly terrifying. At one point, Bill Navison has climbs to the bottom of a stairwell that is constantly changing size and shape. At one point, it takes six days to climb down it, but at the moment, it only takes ten minutes. There is also a point where it is 750 meters wide. Anyway, he is loading up an injured man on a stretcher to be hauled up the stairwell by his brother at the top when the entire stairwell suddenly grows to the point where he can no longer hear his brother. After an hour waiting at the bottom of the stairwell, a quarter suddenly drops, at which point Bill Navison figures out that if his brother tossed it over within a few minutes of the stairwell lengthening, it means that the height of the entire stairwellhas grown larger than the circumference of the planet.

Another really disquieting part is just a footnote:

This is not the first time individuals exposed to total darkness in an unknown space have suffered adverse psychological effects, Consider what happened to an explorer entering the Sarawak Chamber discovered in the Mulu mountains in Borneo. This chamber measures 2,300 feet long, 1,300 feet wide, averages a height of 230 feet and is large enough to contain over 17 football fields. When first entering the chamber, the party of explorers kept close to a wall assuming incorrectly that they were following a long, winding passageway. It was only when they chose to to return by striking straight out into that blackness - expecting to run into the opposite wall - that they discovered the monstrous immensity of that cavern: “So the trio marched out into the dark expanse, maintaining a compass course through a maze of blocks and boulders until they reached a level, sandy plain, the signature of an underground chamber. The sudden awareness of the immensity of the black void caused one of the cavers to suffer an acute attack of agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces. None of the three would later reveal who panicked, since silence on such matters is an unwritten law among cavers.” Planet Earth: Underground Worlds p. 26-27

6

I forwarded the initial post to my wife, who is currently finishing up her English Major, and reading Frankenstein for one of her classes. Here’s what she said:

In thinking about House of Leaves and Frankenstein and comparing the horror
elements, or rather, why they both are pereceived by the majority of readers
as horror novels, I believe it is in part because they both take the reader
through space/time in a way which most people find horrifying: the
unreliable narratives of the mad, the physically different, the blind. All
of these not-normals experience both space and time, what normals persuade
themselves is the “real” world, in ways which terrify the normal/sane reader
more than any act of violence can, because to the reader who is determined
to commit himself to the belief that what he sees is the “truth” having some
glimpse through the dorr of perception and witnessing scenes which disprove
the safe comforting theory of real=truth=normal is a psychologically and
spiritually violent kind of murder. In a way, madness/disability IS
contagious, just as all acts on the part of the normals to isolate the
physically/mentally different members of their group implies, because these
strange ways of perceiving, these differing views of reality, are
experienced as an earthquake ripping through L.A., destroying the intricate
but never perfectly safe constructions they have always taken for granted as
objects existing that not only exist apart from change, but stand in as
physical markers of their sense of the real world. Compare this to the
landscape as experienced by someone who is blind, where objects used as
markers move/disappear inexplicably on a daily basis, yet the blind person
has to have enough belief that this is the same landscape that she can
continue to navigate safely. How would Zampano have experienced the house?
Is there some possibility of saying what others experienced was his
creation? Maybe that dark labyrinth was Zampano’s offspring?

kes

7

I’m not quite 100 pages into this book yet, so my opinion is kind of premature, but in the best tradition of Brian Koontz I’ll offer it anyway :D .

I see where Dr. Crypt is coming from by saying that Danielewsky wrote Johnny’s parts badly, but I’m not sure I agree. I agree that the stream-of-consciousness is a bit of a mess, but I think it’s deliberate. I think Johnny’s supposed to be self-consciously “artistic”, without actually being good at it.

For example, he has all these drawings that he does on tracing paper that he thinks are great, full of intricate details with dragon scales and so on. But when he shows them to his boss, who Johnny acknowledges really knows his stuff, the boss tells him to get a typing job instead. (This example is why I’m posting now, incidentally–the book’s so long, I was worried I’d forget it by the time I get to the end). Anyways, I think you can read his footnotes like that–sometimes the less-affected Johnny comes through, but mostly he feels like he has to write this hi-falutin’ stuff because, after all, he’s sensitive, not like, say, Lude.

Gav

PS Maybe it’s too many readings of “Pale Fire” messing me up, but I keep thinking there may be an interesting reading where Zampano made up Johnny as well. But I’ll have to read more of the book to see.

8

I think you might be right as far as Danielewski’s intentions, but there is almost no reason short of parody for a good writer to allow a bad narrator real estate in his text. If it was an aesthetic decision, it was a poor one, since Johnny being both sensitive and untalented isn’t necessary in the context of the novel’s structure, and the decision renders large chunks of the novel almost unreadably tacky.

As for the Zampano = Johnny Truant inquiry, that would have been interesting, but as the novel reads now there’s very little interest in following that inquiry. Luckily, the book’s interesting enough not to make that a lost opportunity.

9

For better or for worse, though, the book (at least the first 100 pages) is filled with parody–there’s the bit about Pierre Menard’s “Don Quixote” (I was cracking up while reading that), or the long digression about sound waves and echoes, and lots of other little digressions that seem to be there just to parody something else. Is there more to them, or are they just funny? I dunno–haven’t read enough to decide yet.

Gav

10

Well, the difference there is that is Zampano parodying accademmia, not Danielewski - you need to separate the author’s voice from the narrator’s. I already mentioned what I thought the role of Zampano’s intellectual parody is within the novel: Zampano is, through identification, Tom Navison, who also parodies the house in order to stay sane while trapped inside it. d be interested in seeing what you think of that idea once you’ve finished the novel. As it is, I have to reject the idea that Truant’s awful stream-of-consciousness crap is parody or should be forgiven even if it is.

11

OK, I’m going to continue commenting without having finished the book (aiming for a Koontz award). Plus, this way I get back to look at my posts later, and see what an idiot I was in the middle…

First off, I think the parodying of academia works into Johnny’s stuff as well–see, for example, his complete bewilderment at the Pierre Menard bit. But, more importantly, I’m leaning more than ever toward my idea that Zampano is supposed to be Johnny. Today, I ran across one footnote (#131) where Z is footnoting Johnny’s note.

Also, the weird layout in chapter IX only works if Johnny’s footnotes are part of the text. But at the same time, if you think Johnny re-worked Z’s layout, then Z’s layout couldn’t have made much sense.

If they really are one & the same, then it’s easy to reconcile Johnny as another parody.

(I may be reading too much into this, but this is exactly the sort of game that Nabokov plays in “Pale Fire”, and this book seems strongly influenced by that one. Consider, for example, footnotes 46-the one after 53; take the first letter of each footnote–it’s something like what Nabokov puts into his texts)

Gav

12

As I was reading the book tonight, I came across another bit that strengthens my Zampano = Johnny theory:

Those oddly-shaped footnotes (like “||”, or “|>” or “X”) are all part of the ground-air code (see the first collage, appendix II-C). (By the way, if you didn’t see this (as I didn’t for quite a while), go back and check out some of those footnotes–it adds an extra meaning to the text, usually kind of funny. They mostly seem to be in chapter IX, so far)

Johnny’s father was a pilot, so at the very least there’s a link between those footnotes and him (especially when you think that Zampano’s supposed to be blind), even though Zampano wrote the whole thing before Johnny came along.

Just a random epiphany, not sure that it proves anything, but I thought I’d throw it into the mix.

Gav

13

OK, I feel like a right idiot. After ranting about the Nabokov influences, I found an interview with Danielewski where he says he hasn’t read “Pale Fire”. (Although he then goes on to say that we’re influenced by what we don’t read as much as by what we do read…)

The interview’s here: http://www.gsrdesigns.com/mzd.htm

Gav

14

After a mammoth reading session, I finished the book.

First off, I honestly don’t see this as anything like a horror novel. Sure, it uses the tropes of horror, but it never struck me that the intent is to scare the reader–in fact, just the opposite. Tension will start building, and then all of a sudden Danielewski throws in a puzzle, or a silly footnote, or something which pulls the reader (or at least, pulled me) right out of the novel. It’s sort of like Danielewski’s saying “why are you getting tense here–all this stuff’s not real! You should be trying to figure out if Johnny is the minotaur or something.”

If anything, the novel seems to me to center around reconciliation–Johnny remembers that his mother didn’t try to kill him, and the Navidson and Kelly reconcile when he rescues her from the house. (Who does Zampano reconcile himself with, though? I’d need to think about it)

That sort of ties in with whether Johnny’s sections are badly written. I’d argue that they need to be the way they are to provide a counterpoint to him when he’s at his most sane, right near the end. Notice also, that at that point he drops the annoying “would of”–maybe other stuff was a persona of how JT imagines someone like him would write, if that makes any sense.

I guess overall I liked the novel, and I’d happily recommend it to some folks I know, but for me it felt like the heart wasn’t quite there. I’d sort of compare it to “Ulysses”, where Joyce also plays lots of games, but he never loses sight of the humanity of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom–he never devolves into simple puzzle-laying.

Gav

15

I just read this based on a well-intentioned recommendation (I still <heart> you, Kelly Wand!) and it just made me mad. What a load of overwrought, poorly written wankery. That the author sees fit to mash an appendix of the character’s poetry at the end says it all. And wouldn’t you know it: it all comes down to mother issues. Sheesh. Isn’t the same old Freud stuff kind of passe yet?

It was an awesome concept, though. A cross between H.P. Lovecraft and a Charlie Kaufman script. Sounds good to me. And of course the house is the book, given that “leaves” (i.e. pages) are at no point mentioned in connection to the actual house itself. I got that part pretty quickly.

But it was so poorly written at times, and so in love with its gimmick that it had no compunction about cramming the pages full of turgid padding. But mostly I just don’t think Danielewski is a good writer. The Johnny Truant bits were so wretched, and Zampano’s reams of film criticism were so implausible and self-congratulatory for all its winking and nudging, that each section made me wish I was reading the other section. It was like being ping-ponged between bad and worse.

The best thing to come of House of Leaves was reading Crypt’s comments above. And if I liked it more, I would have enjoyed stuff like sussing out the slip into first person and how some of the footnotes interrelate, but as of about half-way through, this thing just became a chore that I kept at just to see where it was finally going to go. The answer: no place it could sustain without a better writer. :(

-Tom
16

Back in the Braid thread there was an article that made lots of references to this book (I’ll go back to Braid as it pertains to HoL later in this post). Amazon describes House of Leaves as, “Had The Blair Witch Project been a book instead of a film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors of Blast at their most avant-garde, the result might have been something like House of Leaves.” Bret Easten Ellis opines, “a great novel, it renders most other fiction meaningless. one can imagine thomas pynchon, j.g. ballard, stephen king and david foster wallace bowing at danielewski’s feet, choking with astonishment, surprise, laughter, awe.” The quotes definitely caught my interest.

I’m a sucker for haunted house stories. I’m also a sucker for layered & unique styles with wacky mind games within. This book deliverers. You have a movie, explained by a blind man, who is transcribed by an LA low life, the existence for all of the three are suspect. The movie, The Navidson Record (TNR), is the most standard story and the most engaging for me personally. I love the “Explorations” into the house. I would really love to see how the details in those moments would actually be captured in a film. I’m surprised no film student has ever YouTubed the Five and a Half minute hallway sequence. The ending of TNR was anticlimactic but most horror stories are.

The second layer is the blind old man Zampano who writes a detailed analysis of the film. This layer while having the most text is probably the least descriptive. Most of his story is shrouded in small details, the rest is piled upon by sometimes painful analysis and references to the film by other authors and experts in every aspect whether it’s psychology, mathematics, literature, cinema, you name it, that facet is explored as it pertains to TNR.

Finally we have Johnny Truant, a young clubbite working as an assistant in a tattoo parlor who finds Zampano’s dead body during the introduction and has painstakingly reconstructed all of Z’s notes into this rough book. His story is the decent of madness as you go further in. To further his story we have “The Whalestoe Letters” (can be purchased separately on Amazon but an abridged version is included in the appendix of HoL) which is a one way communication where Jonny’s mother writes from a mental institution to him. Those letters are pretty interesting in their own right and reading them gives a deeper sense of understanding to Johnny.

HoL is like an ARG before ARGs even existed. There are so many secrets and puzzles that the astute reader will have a lot of ‘ah-ha’ moments throughout the book. Coded messages, unreliable narrators, font meanings (Zampano’s is Times, Johnny’s is Courier, the Editor’s is Bookman - This is all intentional and relevant), pictures, poems, drawings, the variety in the content is impressive. Hell, the author (Danielewski) is the brother of Poe - a singer/songwriter who even has a complementary album “Haunted” which goes along with the book. The more attention you put to the details, the more story/theme puzzles pieces you can figure out. Danielewski has so much hidden in the book that it would take a life time to figure it all. In fact the book is about 9 years old and there’s still a lot left unsolved.

Which brings me back to Braid. So many similarities to both works it’s very interesting. Both are deconstructive to their media. Both have a very cryptic narrative. Both demand more from their audience then the standard of their mediums. Both stories deal with obsession and the detrimental effects. Neither have been satisfactorily analyzed. Ask Blow and Danielewski about the purpose of this or that and they will wink and grin and perhaps tell you to think harder about it.

In the article linked above Julian criticizes Braid in the epilogue. That Jonathan Blow walked center stage and revealed himself too much. I think Mark Z. Danielewski does the same thing. HoL doesn’t really end in any tidy way. The Navidson Record film ends fairly abruptly, Zampano’s analysis is without conclusion and Johnny’s finale is beyond cryptic. If that wasn’t bad enough, the book ends with a seemingly endless amount of appendix information - all of it germane to the story and apparently necessary. Julian thinks that Blow’s voice dominates? One of the ending pieces of information in HoL are the Pelican Poems - written by Danielewski during his personal journeys in Europe (not credited to him in the book but his none the less). Both Braid and HoL can be seen as a “pompous, self-absorbed and too-clever-by-half attempt to create conversation about the artist and his process, rather than the work itself.” You either get hooked by the insanity of it all or you don’t and laugh at all the bullshit.

Sometimes you teeter on the edge of both opinions.

All in all I think the book is worth a read if you want something different, something unsettling, something that doesn’t quite fit together… and may stay in your head a lot longer then it probably should.

17

Bret Easten Ellis opines, “a great novel, it renders most other fiction meaningless. one can imagine thomas pynchon, j.g. ballard, stephen king and david foster wallace bowing at danielewski’s feet, choking with astonishment, surprise, laughter, awe.”

i’m a fan of the book but come on, now.

18

Yeah. Ellis must’ve owed him big time to lavish that kind of praise. ;p

Anyways, for those still interested: I found an interesting little supplimental album that Mark and his sister Poe did regarding the book. It’s basically some readings from the book set with sounds and music. Kinda cool even if you haven’t read the book.

http://markzdanielewski.info/media/tracks.html

Track 6 and 11 are the most interesting IMO.

19

I only wish to comment that Poe is fantastic, Haunted was an amazing album, his followup Only Revolutions was skimpy, and House of Leaves left me confused and irritated.

20

I wanted to post in this thread because I just read this sucker over the weekend, and while I don’t think the writing is overall very good, it was well worth the time and stands as a very interesting piece of literature, mainly for it’s complexity and the multiple layers. However I noticed no one in this thread had the same conclusion I did about the characters. In fact some mention that Zampano’s arc has no conclusion and Navidson has a happy ending…uh, not as far as I can see.

Zampano is Navidson. His knowledge of film and photography and especially his familiarity with the Navidson Record itself suddenly make sense. Heck, he names himself after a Fellini character.

Pelafina Leivre is Karen Green. She speaks about practicing her smile, and one of her letters mentions Zampano. Once Karen escapes the house, there is a pink ribbon in her hair, just like from her Whalestoe letters. After the house she goes crazy and scars her son for life, thus needing to be committed.

Johnny Truant is Chad Navidson. They make a pretty big deal out of his father’s obituary being edited. But both characters spend much of their childhoods fighting in school and living outdoors.

Tom Navidson is Johnny’s real father. They point out the estrangement of brothers around Chad’s birth, and Zampano hints towards his loss of a brother.

Thumper is Daisy Navidson. This is messed up, but look at their first encounter where Johnny lusts after her and see how much he leaves out, and how he can’t quite remember what he wants to say about her, and how the Editors mention his reluctance to ever revisit his comments about her. They were separated for adoption.

Anyways, that’s enough for this long dead thread, I just wonder if anyone else has read it this way. Try it, I think you’ll find it way more rewarding. The Navidson’s never really escape the house, it ruins their life.