House of Leaves

[Loki]

Has anybody read this? I can't put the thing down. It's totaly messing with me too. Anybody who read my attempt to play Silent Hill 2 knows that I have a weak consitution for dark, opressive, sujestive horror. I'm jumping at shadows and everything has a gloomy feel and I can't stop reading. I'm at least 2 days behind everyone else in Final Fantasy XI now because of it too.

I'ma go read some more...

[IRC]

Re: House of Leaves

Do you want to put it in the freezer?

[Vonwert]

Re: House of Leaves

I have the book. I read the first chapter, but haven't gotten to the rest of it yet. Very weird and twisting.

[Big Rick Cook]

Re: House of Leaves

Is this a novel or what?

[truekid]

Re: House of Leaves

it's an oddly formatted book by the brother of the singer "Poe" (who did that "Angry Johnny" song). about 3 or 4 years ago, when i was working at a book store, pretty much the entire city was sold out all at once, it was impossible to keep enough in stock for about a month.

[Magus]

Re: House of Leaves

I'm familiar with it. It's a Lovecraftian tale about a house with impossible physical dimensions though it appears normal on the inside. It's told through various notes and diaries written by previous owners of the house and an investigator, I think. I read some of the monstrous description and it was soitenly hair-raising.

M I RITE?

[Loki]

Re: House of Leaves

Kinda.

The book is a critical essay about a documentary about a family who moves into a new house. At first everything is normal, but after returning from vacation they find a new room where there wasn't one before. Trying to discover why there is a new room they find out that the house measures more on the inside than it does on the outside, and that it's growing larger day by day. Soon a door appears in the living room that opens into a dark and forbidding hall. There's no light, heat, or movement in the hall. Imagine any of the deserted hallways in Silent Hill. Soon they start investigating the hallway, which leads into a labyrinth of immense size.

The book is structured as the essay on the movie of these events, with excessive footnotes by the author and the guy who finds the manuscript after the author dies. In his footnotes you learn his story of drugs, sex, and paranoia in 90's LA.

The book is also uniquely designed. The word house is always printed in blue, text is layered out on the page in strange ways. During the first journey into the labyrinth footnotes crowd the page. At a point where a character is running for his life there are only one or two words on a page so the reader is turning them faster to find out what happens. In one chapter the characters start hearing an SOS call in Morse code being knocked on the walls. The paragraphs in this chapter are long and short, spelling out a Morse code message in themselves.

Neat stuff.

[jvrlopez]

Re: House of Leaves

The whole house is growning bigger aspect reminds me of the supposedly haunted Wincester Mansion. Sounds like a good read, even though I haven't read any fiction since Mystic River, Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon, and Murder on the Orient Express a few months back.

As for now, I'm split between re-reading "Lexicon Devil:The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and The Germs" and reading "We Got The Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A Punk"

I had forgot how fun and relaxing reading a good book was.

[IRC]

Re: House of Leaves

Sounds interesting but the uniqueness of it might discourage me from enjoying it. If I'm ever at the library or a bookstore and I remember it I'll check it out.