House of Leaves question

I agree with Kristine. It's not scary in the sense that you'll look under your bed or may want to sleep with the lights on. It's disconcerting. Some of its ideas, if thought through, can shatter what you would consider reality. It's this feeling of any loss of spatial perception: down turning up, stairs leading nowhere, the whole world changing around you without any rhyme or reason, and, last but not least, being separated from those you love with no hope of making it back of your own volition.

For me, as for many others I've spoken with about this book, one integral part of it is a love story. And here I'm not just talking about the love between Navidson and his wife, but also of a love for language and the unknown, of what you can do with suggestion alone. Supply a featureless world and have the reader fill it.

I agree - not Freddy Kruger scary. Insane asylum with locked doors and no personnel scary. Something oily and rather putrid that you can't wash off. A taunting presence on the shelf or nightstand. Less giving me nightmares than it gave me daymares - waking periods of gibbering darkness as I felt the way through my own maze of expanding nothingness. It's a weird freekin' book.

I wouldn't call it scary, but it is definitely disturbing. It has the potential to seep through the cracks and kind of take over your worldview for a little while. I didn't get nightmares at all, but depending on your mental state while reading, I can see how it might be distressing!

I do find it disturbing and unsettling, but for me, it's more like existential horror and not, you know, typical monster-under-your-bed stuff. I think this novel really captures the feeling of irrationality, the absence of answers and reason. It makes you feel, at least for a while, that the world is ultimately chaotic and incomprehensible. The numerous literary references and footnotes scattered all over the text really get this point across: they are there, but in the end, they never really explain anything.

I... a good color for that letter would be the exact color of the book's page, camouflaged. Never to appear. Or, not used at all. What a strange book THAT would be. A book that would refuse to use our fourth-most-used letter?

Surely not a project that couldn't be handled by MZD. The guy's got more than just a bag of trucks. See, sans-that-fourth-most-used-letter, one would have to start to pull all sorts of nonsenses out of the hat. And mostly you would use the second person, or the one after that. Such a book could be set... long ago. On a boat. By the docks. Yes, once, upon a planet sans-watches-or-clocks, and could stumble, as books do, across a young lady as she calls her cat. 'Here, Cat,' she calls, just as she absently catches her hat, and the breeze resumes the tugs at her locks.

See, and you start to type THAT sort of melange. Or several letters or words on the page start to change colors: one a Deep Purple, another a Forest Green, and House more Navy than the House 's ever been, except of course on faraway web-pages and such such as here. Here we are but droplets. Here, at the bottoms of buckets on the decks of boats long out at sea. We pass each other, but we scarce ever see.

Oh, wow. I thought I was the only one. I let this book rot on my nightstand for? 18 months?? Then I gingerly read the 1st section...for some reason, no book has filled me with such dread---I kept asking friends who read it...how bad does it get? Their vague answers didn't help. I should confess, I was an idiot who fainted in study hall in high school reading the crucifux scene in the Exorcist...Then couldn't remember what I read that made me pass out! Avoided "that page" for like 7 years until I felt brave enough to revisit it. (After I'd been through childbirth, yada) Well, I eventually plunged into House of Leaves--definitely a surreal trip..but worth it.

So I see disconcerting, dread[ful]and disturbing from Tina, Tracy and Kristine.All of these, yes. Let me add jarring, sorry no d-word. I had just finished Infinite Jest which was jangling (j) in itself and after the two together I was in quite a state. HOL remains on my desk to decipher more; I feel like I read it too fast and need to go back for riddles I didn't catch. It did not frighten me like Salem's Lot did when I was 16. It did worse.

I guess that everywhere must be somewhere. Even conceptual places like heaven and hell are somewhere, or fall within a given scope of creation.


This house doesn't exist inside a scope. Just around a big empty nope. The concept that something isn't inside reality, not even parallel nor imaginary realities, and it seems all powerful, well I'd rather have Jason Vorhees hacking and slashing at my door.

Chesterton said it once. There are concepts whose mere grasp are in itself too dreadful to hold in your mind

The footnotes. That's what scares me. Perhaps it's partly an academic fear. I'm always misplacing references in my own research. In the book you lose your place with endless diversions that don't necessarily offer you breadcrumbs to follow. Then you have to find your place back in the main text. Becoming lost is scary, especially when you are trying your hardest to stay in control. Being lost can be great for creativity... but it's still scary. True, it's not the kind of shiver you get from a good ghost story; but it's more relatable to real life.

I didn't find it scary, at all. I didn't even find it disturbing. I found it to be a bit tedious, actually, although it was a unique concept for a book.

Part of what makes a story good (in my humble opinion) is the author's ability to gain sympathy for the characters from the reader, and I didn't have sympathy for any of the characters in this story. I just didn't care about them. And the story was more about Johnny's descent into madness rather than the house with a bottomless pit room that appears out of nowhere, which is far more interesting and scary to me than a misogynistic man's descent into madness.