Table Of Content
House of Leaves refers to Poe and her songs several times, not only limited to her album Haunted, but Hello as well. One example occurs when the character Karen Green is interviewing various academics on their interpretations of the short film "Exploration #4"; she consults a "Poet," but there is a space between the "Poe" and the "t," suggesting that Poe at one point commented on the book. Arriving at the house to help Navidson measure its dimensions, Tom is said to have improved the family's relationships and mood during his presence.
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The novel has gone on to inspire doctorate-level courses and masters theses, cultural phenomena like the online urban legend of “the backrooms,” and incredible works of art in entirely unrealted mediums from music to video games. Though Truant attributes Zampanò as the author of The Navidson Record, Truant offers few concrete details about Zampanò's character or past, citing only information learned from his former acquaintances. These include neighbors and various students and social workers, exclusively female, who volunteered as readers for Zampanò's research. Unable to even determine Zampanò's full name, Truant only confirms that Zampanò became blind some time during the 1950s, and was approximately eighty years old at the time of his death.
House of Leaves: The Remastered Full-Color Edition
Loose sheets, stained napkins and crammed notebooks prove to be far more than the ramblings of a crazy old man . What happens next is loosely recorded on videotapes and interviews, leading to a compilation of the definitive work on the events on Ash Tree Lane, unveiling a thrilling and terrifying history. Billy Reston is described as an African-American engineering professor at the University of Virginia, rendered paraplegic by a construction site accident near Hyderabad. Reston is said to be a longtime friend of Navidson, who photographed the very moment of Reston's accident.
by Mark Z. Danielewski
Now this incredible novel is available in book form, complete with full-color original words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. In "Exploration #4", an expedition planned to last over a week, Roberts exhaustively provisioned his team, and also brought a gun. On their return after reaching the bottom of the staircase, they found their own caches of supplies vandalized by unknown causes.
Table of Contents
Forbidden by Karen from entering, Navidson delegated exploration to a crew of professional explorers, who found, beyond the hallway, a maze-like complex containing an enormous spiral staircase which appears to descend endlessly. In the maze, they recorded footage of a multitude of corridors and rooms, completely unlit and featureless, with smooth ash-gray walls, floors, and ceilings. The maze is said to be silent save for the sound of a periodic low growl, which is never fully explained. At Zampanò’s apartment, Truant discovers a manuscript written by Zampanò, which turns out to be an academic study of a documentary called The Navidson Record, though Truant says that he can’t find any evidence that the film ever existed.
Flouting conventions of academic writing, Zampanò narrates the lives of the Navidson family during the events depicted in The Navidson Record, set in April 1990, including unfilmed events sourced from media and public records. The family are Will Navidson; his unmarried partner, Karen Green, a former fashion model; and their two children, Chad and Daisy. The novel is written as a work of epistolary fiction and metafiction focusing on a fictional documentary film titled the Navidson Record, presented as a story within a story discussed in a handwritten monograph recovered by the primary narrator, Johnny Truant. The narrative makes heavy use of multiperspectivity as Truant's footnotes chronicle his efforts to transcribe the manuscript, which itself reveals the Navidson Record's supposed narrative through transcriptions and analysis depicting a story of a family who discovers a larger-on-the-inside labyrinth in their house. There is also another female narrator, Truant’s mother, whose voice is featured through a series of stand-alone letters titled The Whalestoe Letters. Each narrator’s text is printed in a unique font, making it easy for the reader to follow the novel’s occasionally challenging format (Truant in Courier New in the footnotes and the main narrative in Times New Roman in the US version).
Believing an unseen creature roamed the maze, Roberts set out to hunt it, imperiling the team's return journey. When he accidentally wounded Hook, Roberts began hunting his own team to cover up his crime, ultimately killing Leeder. Parallel to the plot of the Record, Truant's footnotes document his descent into obsession, delusions, and paranoia as he compiles the manuscript. He recounts tales of sexual encounters, his lust for a tattooed dancer he calls Thumper, and his bar-hopping with his friend Lude.
MyHouse.wad: Doom, House of Leaves, and the Pinnacle of Ergodic Lit LitReactor - LitReactor
MyHouse.wad: Doom, House of Leaves, and the Pinnacle of Ergodic Lit LitReactor.
Posted: Thu, 06 Jul 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Truant also learns that Zampanò was erratic and capricious in his lifestyle and writing habits, diagnosing him with graphomania. House of Leaves was accompanied by a companion piece (or vice versa), a full-length album called Haunted recorded by Danielewski's sister, Anne Danielewski, known professionally as Poe. The two works cross-pollinated heavily over the course of their creations, each inspiring the other in various ways. Poe's statement on the connection between the two works is that they are parallax views of the same story.
Experimental in terms of design, typography, structure and content, this is a fully immersive and novel reading experience you won't be able to forget. The album Haunted also draws heavily from the novel, featuring tracks called "House of Leaves", "Exploration B" and "5&½ Minute Hallway", and many less obvious references. The video for "Hey Pretty" also features Mark Danielewski reading from House of Leaves (pp. 88–89), and in House of Leaves, the band Liberty Bell's lyrics were also songs on Poe's album. The Whalestoe Letters, a compilation of letters written by Truant's mother Pelafina during her committal at The Three Attic Whalestoe Institution, are published both as an appendix to House of Leaves and as a standalone book with additional content.
Though many of the academic works Zampanò cites appear to analyze the Record purely as a work of horror fiction, Zampanò's writing remains adamant as to its authenticity. Now, for the first time, this incredible novel is available in book form, complete with the original full-color words, vertical footnotes, and the newly added second and third appendices. Though Pelafina's letters and Johnny's footnotes contain similar accounts of their past, their memories also differ greatly at times, due to both Pelafina's and Johnny's questionable mental states. Pelafina was placed in the mental institution after supposedly attempting to strangle Johnny, only to be stopped by her husband.
In the beginning of the book, Truant appears to be a normal, reasonably attractive young man who happens upon a trunk full of notes left behind by the now deceased Zampanò. As Truant begins to do the editing, however, he begins to lose the tenuous grip he has on reality, and his life begins to erode around him. He stops bathing, rarely eats, stops going to work, and distances himself from essentially everyone, all in pursuit of organizing the book into a finished work that, he hopes, will finally bring him peace. Johnny Truant serves a dual role, as primary editor of Zampanò's academic study of The Navidson Record and protagonist as revealed through footnotes and appendices. Through its Central Library and 72 branches, the Los Angeles Public Library provides free and easy access to information, ideas, books and technology that enrich, educate and empower every individual in our city's diverse communities.
Zampanò cites research and medical records as evidence that Karen radically transformed her personality while in high school to become indifferent and aloof, and also that Karen suffered from chronic claustrophobia. Will Navidson is described as having become a successful war photographer thanks to an early military career in war-torn regions, though haunted by his role as an impartial documentarist of war. Navidson is said to be a Pulitzer winner and recipient of prestigious arts grants, who has jeopardized his relationship with Karen due to years of prolonged absences while working overseas.
As a conciliatory gesture, Navidson commits to prioritizing family over work by moving to the countryside. After promising Karen not to enter the hallway, he sends a crew in his stead to explore the maze, but privately chafes at this prohibition and breaks his word behind Karen's back. Pelafina, more commonly referred to as simply "P.", is Johnny's institutionalized mother who appears in the appendix to the text.
More paradoxically, Truant notes that Zampanò purports to authoritatively write about filmmaking and cinematography despite being blind. At the same time, Truant's own factual errors, limited knowledge, and open admission to adulterating Zampanò's work also throw his own reliability into question. The text is further marred by missing pages, missing footnotes, missing supplemental documents, and text accidentally or deliberately destroyed by Zampanò, Truant, or unknown causes. In support, Zampanò cites or quotes articles, journals, symposia, books, magazines, TV programs, and interviews, many supposedly dedicated to this film. Zampanò discusses not only Navidson's filmmaking techniques, but also segues into topics such as photography, architecture, Biblical studies, and radiometric dating, often interspersing overwhelmingly esoteric tangents, several of which devolve into nonsensical, page-long lists of only superficially relevant items.
Even as he grows increasingly unstable, Truant remains steadfast in his editorial work, neglecting all else. Navidson's camera captured himself attempting to read a book titled House of Leaves in total darkness; having lost all supplies, he resorted to burning the book page by page to provide light for reading. She turned to filmmaking herself to reconcile her relationship with Navidson, while also showing his footage to literary, artistic, and scientific authorities such as Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick, Douglas Hofstadter, Ken Burns, Harold Bloom, Camille Paglia, Hunter Thompson, Anne Rice, and Jacques Derrida. Navidson, still investigating the house, sought explanations from laboratory analysis, only to learn that samples taken from the maze are older than the Earth itself. The explorations, already challenged by the maze's inhospitable, vast, and ever-shifting nature, finally led to disaster when one of the crew turned on the rest.
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