This is not for you.






”in the psychology of the modern civilized human being, it is difficult to overstate the significance of the house.”
- ANATOMY (2016)

what's house of leaves?

HOUSE OF LEAVES is a horror novel written by mark z. danielewski, published in march 2000. the book is considered to be ergodic literature, and is a notoriously difficult story to pin down. HOUSE OF LEAVES tells a story within a story within a story - the protagonist, johnny truant, discovers an unfinished manuscript by a deceased man named zampano, a writer he has never met. this manuscript details a documentary-style film called the navidson record, which does not exist, and is about a family who move into a strange house that measures slightly bigger on the inside than it does on the outside, amongst other abnormalities. on top of this, the book is riddled with secret messages, hidden codes, and a whole other story laying just below the surface to reward any further reads.

i first purchased and attempted to read this book when i was in early high school, probably somewhere around 2014. i didn't know anything about it other than it was odd and a unique read, so i grabbed it from my local bookstore without thinking much of it. the first time i tried to read it, i gave up entirely and shelved it for about a year. it was complex; it's confusing, and demands your full attention. if you think you can skim through this book and use context to pick up what you missed, you are not going to have a good time! i sat down the following year and dug into it on a long plane ride and absolutely could not put it down. it became one of my favourite books very quickly, and my copy nowadays is filled with notes and annotations of new codes and secrets i've discovered over the years of re-reads.


why i love it

it's a hard thing to explain, but i have always loved media about a house that hates you. it's very easy to make a story about a house that contains something evil, but to have a house itself that is evil is another thing entirely. we are programmed to find our house safe, our homes should be a place we feel comfortable and we trust to keep us safe. it is an incredible thing when the story is about a house that's working against you. there is an absolutely wonderful video essay on youtube about this that i revisit frequently: CONTROL, ANATOMY, AND THE LEGACY OF THE HAUNTED HOUSE by Jacob Geller. it talks a lot about kitty horrorshow's ANATOMY, which is another fantastic little piece of media about a house, and also touches on HOUSE OF LEAVES and the themes within it.

another thing i adore about the book is its complex and difficult nature. it drew me to the book in the first place, it kept me interested as i read it, i adore the journey that this book takes you through - from pausing to quickly google something you've never heard of, to flipping the book upside down to read random passages in the margins, and finding things on the third readthrough that you didn't think twice about the first time. there is a section within this book where the characters are stuck within an impossibly long and desolate hallway. it's tense, it's scary, and the desperation of the characters is communicated through passages that slowly get more and more sparse, until you're desperately flicking through pages that only have a word or two on them to get to the end and see what happens to them. it's brilliant, it's a complete art piece. i cannot recommend this one enough.
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fav breakdowns, analyses
& related media

HOUSE OF LEAVES has wormed its way into a lot of places in recent years, in both subtle and not so subtle ways; whether this be the appearance of the word "house" in blue, or a discussion of the greek minotaur in red, struck through text, or even just straight up mentioning a five and a half minute hallway. here's a few of my favourite video essays, analysis videos, discussions, or HOL inspired media: