House of Leaves

ISSUE #19

After a few months of Earwyrms, a pattern seems to have emerged from the fog of improvisation: I make playlists for the books I've been reading. This week, I'm finally making my way through House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. It's a monstrous read, wonderfully scary and a demented mess. It has a fractured narrative and multiple framing devices, but it's mainly about a haunted house that spawns doors to pitch-black hallways that twist and turn for miles, revealing endless rooms with 200-foot ceilings, bottomless pits, spiral staircases, moving walls, and strange growls from the darkness. A family moves in and makes a Blair Witch-style horror film about the house (or is it a documentary?). We follow our primary narrator as he reads and notates a piece of academic criticism about the video, the manuscript of which he found near a man discovered dead.

In short, it's about a labyrinth, and the book is just as hard to get through as the mysterious house. Form mirrors content, and it's famous for its formal experimentation: many parts of the story are told through footnotes, or footnotes of footnotes; there are passages that are upside-down and backward, and pages with as little as one word on them. I'm currently at a footnote where the author is listing dozens of different types of HVAC systems, in a tiny blue box in the middle of the page. You have to follow the footnote through multiple pages of this blue box, creating the effect of a physical hole cut into the book. It disorients the reader, and forces them to double back and try a different route through the story, just like those exploring the house. It's much more engaging than it sounds. I made a playlist just for the adventure.

I have a fledgling theory about the horror genre and its special connection to those with depression. I feel bizarrely comfortable in the world of the abject and spooky. Happy endings and lighter fare have a mocking effect when your baseline is miserable, stoking, at worst, seething jealousy, and, at best, a feeling the world is out to deceive you. My fucked-up patterns of cognition distort the mundane into the formless and terrifying — the terror of going out in public; of people exploiting my vulnerability; of being left behind, lost, or lesser-than. I like stories of external terrors, ones that are conquerable. Ones from which escape is an achievable outcome.

It's important to mine delight from the darkness, to dig it out and expose it. Making it through the labyrinth that is House of Leaves has been more rewarding than most of my "real accomplishments," whatever those may be in a world where material gain is usually at the expense of others. When you're forced to face the shadows more than most, it can be something you gravitate toward, an oppotunity for catharsis.

There's the added bonus that horror just tends to sound cool. In music, darkness rules — plunking synths, echoing reverb, spectral vocals. These are songs full of creaks and groans, phrases that circle and swirl, the soundtrack of streetlamps. The Halloween playlist is still a ways away, but here's an early taste.