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.
Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (2008) by John Langan, containing the stories "On Skua Island" (2001), "Mr. Gaunt" (2002), "Tutorial" (2003), "Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of Purple Flowers" (2007), and "Laocoon, or, The Singularity" (2008):
John Langan's 2002 novella "Mr. Gaunt" is on my all-time list of the most startling 'first-time' reading experiences I've had with an author. It's a great, disturbing piece of horror that acknowledges the past (especially Henry James explicitly and J. Sheridan LeFanu implicitly) while being a fresh and contemporary take on venerable horror tropes. Langan makes the skeleton scary again. How improbable is that?
"Mr. Gaunt" was only Langan's second published story, but it signaled the arrival of a new master of horror. "On Skua Island" was his first work, a slightly more conventional take on horror tropes with a frame story that's as old as ghost stories and as post-modern as any nod to the storyness of a story.
There's only one problem with Langan's first collection. In going with a chronological approach, it puts the two most horrifying stories first. It's a problem that's easily rectified by the reader, of course -- start with "On Skua Island" but move "Mr. Gaunt" to the end of your reading of the five stories included in the collection. It's really a show-stopper.
"Tutorial" is a nice piece of academic horror/satire that takes shots at ideologically stagnant Creative Writing courses and the omnipresence of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. Kudos, I say! Langan was and is in academia, and his observations about the terrors of the Ivory Tower are keenly observed and often darkly hilarious.
"Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of Purple Flowers" is both the most pulpy and the most avant-garde of the stories included herein. It's a collaboration between John Langan and his 10-years'-earlier self.
It's a propulsive running battle between a man and a woman on one side and a pack of mysterious monsters on the other. In media res is the order of the day, along with unanswered questions about the nature of the apocalypse these two humans have found themselves trapped within, all served up with the final cherry of an ending that offers no real closure. It's very enjoyable but also almost weightless.
"Laocoon, or, The Singularity" is the most recent of the stories in the collection. It's also previously unpublished, so, Bonus Content! Its portrayal of a depressed, dejected All But Dissertation (ABD) fine arts student trapped in the Hell of Sessional Lecturers rings absolutely true, says I, who once resided in English Literature's version of that Hell.
The novella manages the difficult task of moving a reader's feelings for the protagonist from sympathy to pity as the unacknowledged horror of his situation grows. The end can be taken straight up or as an allegory on self-destructiveness -- or as an allegory on the transformations that can be wrought on someone with an undiagnosed and unrecognized mental illness that gradually eats away the better self.
The collection also includes a generous Notes section by Langan on the origins and process of the stories. It's a fine collection overall, and you'll only heighten its overall effect if you leave "Mr. Gaunt" for last. Highly recommended.
