One of the strangest books I have ever read, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is twisted, confusing and may require rereads to follow the story well. Actually, I should say "stories" because not only are there several narrators telling a story at once, there are also several references to other tales. The way I understand it is that the novel is itself a labyrinth with a clever use of typography to tell underlying messages and show "passages" in the story as if you're wandering in a maze created by text.
But I'll tell a little about the story before going on about labyrinths. At it's center House of Leaves is about a family and their strange house. Will Navidson and Karen Green move into a Virginia house with their two kids and soon find out that the house bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. In other words, the actual measurements of the house defy the laws of physics. Not only does the house defy these laws but it soon completely ignores them and a terrible space starts to grow and consume the people who investigate that house.
One day, Navidson and Green return to a house with new doors and passages leading into dark hallways which should not exist. The house shifts and the dark areas get massively larger. Reading about it is a mindbender.
Now the thing about the Navidson house is that it was documented on video. The book is actually a transcription and analysis of that video by a man named Zampano. This man does an insane amount of research to study every scene, every image, every word, and each character in the video to write his book. Unfortunately, Zampano is somewhat unreliable being that he cites resources that do not exist and meanders in his explanations and footnotes throughout the novel. Not to mention that he is also blind which makes one wonder how he is able to write so much about a video.
But House of Leaves is not narrated (at least in the immediate sense) by Zampano but by another man named Johnny Truant. Truant is the one who puts together Zampano's unfinished manuscript which had been left behind when the old man passed away. As the story unfolds, Truant becomes increasingly obsessed with completing the book and quickly ignores all other parts of his life to do it.
So what we have is the story of a troubled young man finishing a book started by an old man which analyzes and discusses the contents of a documentary film (which doesn't exist) about a group of people affected by a dark space appearing in their house (which shouldn't exist). As you can see, even an attempt at an explanation resembles a maze as well.
But that's what makes this book so interesting! So far, this may be enough to entice someone into reading the book. But what makes this better (or insanely original if you will) is the way that these stories are told. It is the reason I purchased this book in the first place. House of Leaves has been described as an experimental novel for a reason. The three stories intertwine and correlate with each other, sometimes on the same pages. Footnotes will have their own footnotes and lead the reader down branching paths. Some pages will have one or two words while others will continue the story vertically on the margins of the page. It's hard to explain and you'd probably have a better understanding of what I'm talking about if you go to the bookstore and flip through it instead.
I purchased this book in August of 2007 and have today finally reached the end of it after months of slowly working my way through its labyrinthine form. I haven't read anything like this book (although I suspect there have been others like it before) and will undoubtedly read it again to try to understand it and hope to make it make sense. Plus there's secret messages hidden throughout the whole thing. The end leaves many unanswered questions but that's probably done on purpose. There are times when I just had to keep reading to see what would happen. Other times I needed three bookmarks to find my way back to where I was after following footnotes and indexes and appendixes to other parts of the novel. This being once again another reference to leaving a length of fishing line to find one's way out of a labyrinth. Certainly one of the most fun and strange books I have read, I'd recommend this to anyone who is into horror and is looking for something interesting and truly unconventional.
