There aren't many books that are more notorious than House of Leaves, the debut novel of an American writer Mark Z. Danielewski. Released in a time when Internet was slowly starting to pick up on popularity, it has become somewhat a cult book.

There are a few good reasons why is House of Leaves so popular - one might think it's a matter of simply being a strange and unique way of presentation, yet there is more to this novel than just quirky page layouts; even the intrigue of "story within a story" kind of structure it has does not really explain the ellusive phenomenon of the enduring modern classic.

Part of me wants to say the success of House of Leaves is almost parallel to the success of Internet, and quite frankly, the book seems to be like a "paper version" of the world wide web, in a certain way - compare the raising obsession of Johnny Truant, a drug addict without a future who found and edited the manuscript, how it started to consume him and make him really paranoid and uncanny to modern addiction to the Internet. More than that, as I said before, the book is written as a "story within a story" split between two narratives - one about Truant and his escapades, and the other around Zampanò's critical essay on the strange movie called The Navidson Record, which to Truant's mind and findings is a movie that never existed, and that Zampanò simply made up many of the sources he cited inside the manuscript, and so on. However, that does not stop Truant from suffering almost a nervous breakdown. The appendix and "extra content" of the book are also notable for how important they are to the story, which might seem like Truant's and Navidson's (the other hero in the "main" essay) don't really fit, but once you pass those last few pages and the appendix, everything falls into place.

Another aspect that seems to support my theory that the book, or rather, the main essay centering around the Navidson film is like an allegory of the Internet, is the fact that in Truant's eyes, a lot of the book is simply made up and Zampanò was just a graphomaniac who wanted to have his own "literary moment". How many times did we discover that Internet is sometimes not the best source of information, despite trying so hard to find our knowledge within in? Not only Truant's obsession with the essay call up the Internet addiction parallels, but the way how Truant sees the manuscript as convoluted, sometimes straight up lying, with made up annotations and sources, and by itself it's something it's easy to lost in.

However, as much as I would love to look into this novel through the "Internet allegory" lens, there's definitely more to it than I have discovered in my first read. The book itself is alarmingly addictive, and perhaps a little bit creepy in a way. I see it as some kind of ergodic/post-modern take on horror literature, and there's definitely a lot to it than we see on the surface.

tenderbandit

tenderbandit

tenderbandit

tenderbandit