Hello, Tailor

It’s sort of difficult to explain but the main “story” is split into two: 1) the tale of a young man (Johnny Truant, a tattoo artist in LA) who finds a collection of notebooks in the house of a man who recently died. and 2) the story contained in those notebooks.

in fact, the notebooks make up a book of academic criticism, concerning a documentary called “The Navidson Record”, which was the account of a photographer who moves with his family to a small house in rural Virginia. after a while, he begins to realise that there is something wrong with the house — a new room has appeared in between two other rooms, and the measurements of the inside of the house are slightly bigger than the outside. he calls in various architects and engineers to try and figure out what’s going on, but eventually it becomes clear that the house contains some kind of vast, unexplained darkness that appears and disappears at will. so eventually, he has to take a look inside. the whole thing is soaked in this intense feeling of dread, because you KNOW that an exploration like this will end in disaster — even though the story is being told third-hand, from the perspective someone analysing the documentary he made about his experiences (and the other critical and cultural responses to that documentary).

it’s fascinating because this academic book is written in this absolutely dry style, full of footnotes. and Johnny Truant’s real life is written in diary format in extra footnotes to THAT. also, this found-footage style movie, The Navidson Record, never actually existed. Johnny Truant can find no record of it ever having been filmed, yet here is this completely reasonable-sounding academic analysis of it, citing hundreds of equally sane-sounding sources. i haven’t reached the end yet, but honestly the whole book so far is fucking terrifying. the story of what happens in the Navidson House is already frightening enough, even without Johnny Truant’s considerably more “human” side-notes slowly trailing off into madness.

another thing about House of Leaves is that it’s written in a pretty unusual style — sometimes a page will only contain a couple of words, or paragraphs will be split into fragments. some parts have been censored or are missing, and there are pages and pages of notes and photographs and poems at the end. it’s not just a matter of an unreliable narrator, as much as EVERYTHING is completely unreliable. i guess the style is similar to that of tristram shandy? but tristram shandy is generally regarded to be pretty unreadable, i think (i haven’t read it), whereas House of Leaves is INCREDIBLY readable. like, i got it out of the library 3 days ago and am already over halfway through — and it’s a pretty big book. maybe it’s because i just don’t read much horror, but i find it absolutely terrifying, to the extent that i can only read it during daylight hours, and usually only if i’m not alone.

if i were to compare it to anything, it’d be the infamously terrifying short manga “the enigma of the amigara fault”, which touches on similar themes: people going out of their way to investigate a dark and ominous mystery, despite all the obvious signs warning them to stay far away. although i suppose that counts for most horror stories, really. “don’t go near the castle.”