House of Leaves has been on my “to read” list for over a decade. It’s a brick of a book (700+ pages) published in 2000 that defies traditional publishing. Every time I see it, I’m struck by how unlikely it feels it’d ever get published today. It’s a foundational depiction of liminal spaces, a horror subgenre that’s totally popping off right now. But it’s also notoriously a complete pain in the ass to read.
What makes it such a hard book?
- It’s a pastiche. House of Leaves is a work of fiction pretending to be an academic manuscript. It’s dry as hell sometimes. Infuriating at others. Obtuse, pretentious. Overall, it’s maybe 40% actual story; the rest is pedantic word soup sculpted into puzzles meant to evoke the sensation of wandering a labyrinth. I’d argue the majority of contemporary fiction is like hopping into a water slide. There may be twists and turns, breath-taking prose, but gravity is on your side. Cliffhanger chapters, constant tension, consistent momentum. House of Leaves is not like a waterslide. Or if it is, the task is to climb up the waterslide.
- It’s epistolary. Any actual storytelling occurs via transcripts and descriptions of film. I love epistolary writing! But see “it’s a pastiche” above. For every clip of film, you’ll face pages of analysis about it.
- It has multiple nested narratives. House of Leaves has three main layers. The first, at its core, is the Navidson’s story. This story, captured in “the Navidson Record” (i.e., the parents’ filmed experiences), concerns the Navidson family discovering an impossible hallway in their new house. That hallway leads into a cold, grey kaleidoscope of seemingly infinite windowless rooms and winding stairs. The second layer comes from Zampanò, a blind old man (now dead) who wrote an obsessive literary review of everything any critic ever said about the Navidson Record. The third layer is young Johnny Truant, a sensitive party-boy who falls apart as he tries to assemble Zampanò’s notes. In short, the book is a young man’s spiraling footnote commentary on an academic manuscript about an artistically filmed paranormal experience.
- It’s ergodic. Text runs upside-down, backwards, across page spans. Sentences are crammed into boxes, written backwards, mirrored through pages. Hundreds of footnotes lead you in circles.
- It’s intentionally dense. Zampanò isn’t messing around. The critical language about the Navidson Record reads like real, doctoral-level stuff (complete with citations).
I live in Peru. Getting a physical copy of House of Leaves entailed my sister heroically lugging it across two airports. I was ecstatic to receive it! Thunked it straight down on my bedside table. At a glance, I saw the poetry mechanics in its pages, and I started cracking my knuckles, ready to put my old MA in 19th-century Romantic Poetry to work.
Reading House of Leaves took me six months.
That’s not counting my three-month false start, which ended in a lost bookmark and me (devastated) abandoning progress for another month.
Honestly, I only made it through the second time thanks to Oskar’s YouTube videos, where he painstakingly reads the book aloud. (There’s no official audiobook version, given how complex the book is on page, not to mention the number of languages and exhaustive multi-page lists.)
It was brutal. I could only handle half-hour chunks before my brain needed a break. Looking up character names to remember who they even were was a constant at first. I had to flip backward a few times every session. It took several chapters before I caught on to how the footnotes even worked, including input from Zampanò, Johnny, and sometimes “the editors.”
I loved it.
Why on Earth did you find that “enjoyable?”
I’m a freelance editor living in the hellscape of unchecked generative AI rollout. I’m an agented author facing the early decay of yesterday’s traditional publishing industry. I’m a content creator caught in the monopoly-capitalism-enshittification vortex of social media platforms.
I am constantly at war with hours. On the one hand, there’s the number of hours I want to spend on each talented client’s amazing project, the number of hours I want to pour into writing my own characters, into connecting with other creators online. On the other hand, there’s the number of hours in a day.
Holding my heavy copy of House of Leaves is like holding all the precious hours that went into it.
Of course, those hours were the author’s. But also those of the editor, the poor formatter. A collaboration of gifted time. God, as we head deeper into this efficiency-worship era, I feel those hours in my soul. Their weight is grounding. I want to cradle them.
I read plenty of “easy” books too. Light, quick, fluffy books save lives. They can educate and totally have value. But damn, I didn’t realize until House of Leaves just how much my mind and heart needed a hard book again.
So House of Leaves is worth it?
Yeah, man. I think it’s worth it.
Michelle-Johnson Wang writes a way better article than this one about that question in Berkeley Fiction Review: “This is not for u/[redacted]: The uncritical reception of House of Leaves” (2025).
But in short, I’ll be thinking about this story for a long time. What did that house represent? What is the labyrinth a metaphor for? Are we the minotaur? Are we the king who locks his son away? Why does it matter that the language Zampanò uses is so abstract and convoluted? Does that relate somehow to Zampanò’s blindness?
One of my favorite things about the book is that any effort to understand it means the book “wins.” You’re in the labyrinth now. You’re participating in the illusion, another voice trapped in the manuscript.
One of my other favorite things is its respect toward the labor of reading.
Back in the day, I cut my teeth as a nonfiction editor with graduate students’ work. I read thousands of theses and dissertations in medicine, finance, accounting, law, engineering, etc. Most of the authors were second-language speakers, and my job was primarily to correct their English.
I was (and still am) very good at this job. But the one rare complaint was “you made it sound less academic.” This complaint inevitably came from the students leaning on wordiness to project authority, on mile-long sentences and flowery vocab to hide weaknesses.
When we write, we are asking for other people’s hours. We’re requesting the time of our readers, their energy. It’s not cool to maximize the amount of time you’re asking for when you minimized the amount of time you invested.
House of Leaves asks for many hours. But it’s the manifestation of many more. Spot an oddity or inconsistency, chase it, and you’ll be rewarded.
Enjoy this content?
If you like nonfiction, check out my blog “The Best Nonfiction Books I’ve Ever Read.” I also ramble happily on about Jarod K. Anderson’s Something in the Forest Loves You in my blog “Poetry and Nature as Important Tools to Express Emotion.”
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