Mr Pink wrote:
I was wondering if anybody actually read or ever heard of this book in here. Today I spoke with a friend who highly kept on suggesting this book to me saying that it's the best (horror) story he had. After seing the book itself I was amused by its blizzare design. I really want to give it a shot, but I am not quite sure if this book will be interesting.
P.S. It's kind of ironic that the first page of the book says: "This is not for you."
Hi 'Mr Pink'
Well, it's not a book for a lot of people. It uses multiple narrators to tell the story, as a lot of post modernist books do, to disrupt the reader's expectations. There are two subplots blended thoughout as well. But what makes the book unpopular (or just difficult) for a lot of people is the other techniques Danielewski uses to challenge the reader. Some pages have only a few lines, some are full of code, others are made up nearly entirely of footnotes in which part the narration takes place and the plot is advanced. There is nothing really new to this - Laurence Sterne's book 'Tristram Shandy' was the first major novel to do this in 1759 (hence it being argued by critics as the forerunner of postmodern writing).
The plot itself - which I won't spoil by outlining - is interesting but you have to work (this is what the author intended) hard to get to that story. But then that's the same in life.
If you do want to know more check out a prety detailed set of information in Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves#TypographyFor me a much slicker use of this technique of multiple narritive points to develop a story by a modern author is 'Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey' (2007) by Chuck Palahnuik, the author of 'Fight Club'. It's not a horror though, but rather a very bleak dystopian near future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rant_%28novel%29Bleth
