House of Leaves (2000) by Mark Z. Danielewski

House of Leaves (2000) by Mark Z. Danielewski: Danielewski's ambitious first novel spawned a sort of cult following that is itself metafictional, given that the text within the text spawns a sort of cult following. 

And that text is a lengthy examination of a movie that doesn't seem to actually exist within the world of the text, supplemented by lengthy, autobiographical footnotes from the man who found and assembled the examination of the movie after discovering it in the apartment of a recently deceased, blind writer. 

Who himself also supplied lengthy footnotes to supplement the text he had spent decades writing. A text about a documentary about the House of Leaves. A documentary that doesn't seem to have ever existed. Got all that?

House of Leaves is postmodern and experimental and avant-garde and All That Jazz. It's a horror novel about a house that grows room upon room within itself, within which lurks, perhaps, a monster. Or perhaps the monster is simply the house itself. It does at times appear to be intelligent. It's a love story about a man and his lost, mentally ill mother. It's a satire of academic writing. It's a satire of epics, epic catalogues, epic odysseys. It's an epic itself.

It even turns into a concrete poem for a few dozen pages.

And oh, those footnotes!

The movie at the heart of the narrative is a documentary about attempts to explore and understand those hidden, ever-shifting rooms. The family who owns the house consists of a revered photojournalist, a former model, and two children. One day, when they return from a holiday, their house has somehow acquired a new hallway. And things get weirder from there.

If there's a flaw here, it's the tendency of the text to draw every woman other than the mentally ill mother and, for the most part, the former model as sexy, sexy sex objects. But all those sexy 'librarians' and strippers are part of the frame narrative, the footnote narrative, written by an increasingly unstable 24-year-old man. Are any of these women real? As the sex scenes involving these women all read like Penthouse Forum wish fulfillment, I'd say a conditional 'No.' Or at least I hope not.

However, House of Leaves is otherwise a fine piece of work. A horror story, a love story, a description of a documentary, a family drama, a mystery, an epic. And a convincing portrait of mental illness, if your interpretation goes that way. If your interpretation goes a long way, that way, the whole text is a delivery from a fictional writer who's suffered a monumental break with reality. Or it really is a cosmic horror piece, and so on, and so forth. It can support a whole bag of overlapping interpretations. It has many mansions.

Set aside time to read it. It's a marvelous piece of work. Highly recommended.